A follow-up to 1000 Hours Outside….

If you recall, my last post on this blog was in January — in which I mentioned wanting to spend 1000 hours outside. Well. We spent a lot of hours outside. A lot. At some point, I had tracked up to 600 hours on our tracker sheet. Then one day, I got tired of tracking hours, took the sheet off the fridge, and tossed it out. It didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t need to keep counting. I didn’t want to obsess over that sheet anymore. We just wanted to be outside. I actually don’t think that we will meet the thousand hours goal, but that’s OK. We spent as much time outside as we could and we had a swell year with the outside adventures we could do. And we were intentional about it. That was the point anyway — be intentional about spending more time outdoors. And we loved it. Cheers.

1000 Hours Outside.

A certain challenge caught my eye and I decided to pursue it this year for the sake of my family. It is the 1000 Hours Outside challenge (as explained on 100 Hours Outside Blog).

Since we love to be outside, I figured it would be perfect! The challenge encourages all of us to to step away from screen time — because it is very prevalent among children and adults in today’s world — and spend 1000 hours a year in outside play. Screen time isn’t really an issue in our house, but pushing ourselves to be outside more (my son loves to spend a lot of time inside playing with his cars) will be good for us! Thankfully, we all enjoy the outdoors and my son loves hiking!

1000 hours a year averages to about 2.74 hours a day.

You can kind of tweak this to fit your life. My husband and I both work full-time jobs during the school year while my son is in school. There aren’t enough outdoor weekday hours available to play (especially in the winter). I decided to focus on 1000 hours of being outside — whether this be through play, eating our meals outdoors, BBQs/bonfires, car shows, going to the zoo, swimming, camping, anything that happens outside. I am not counting when my child plays outside at school (I have no way to track that).

It is January 20th around noon and we have only logged 8 hours so far. Two hours were from a car show (yes — in the winter!), an hour was from hiking on a warm day, and the rest were from just playing outside in the yard at home. It’s not a lot. But it is January — a cold month when the sun sets early and all we want to do is hibernate.

By calculations based on a daily average, we should have logged 54.6 hours already. Whoops. No worries. I know we will get plenty of hours caught up once the weather warms up. Or if we ever get enough snow to actually play in!

We have a tracker on the fridge where I color in how many hours we have done so far. And yes, even if it’s a half hour, I just color in a half a circle and fill the other half with the next half hour. You can print your own tracker from here. I plan on color coding mine for each month to see how many hours we get each month. January is a light blue.

I also plan to track my son’s screen time (starting today — it’s an idea that just popped in my head) to compare to his outdoor time.

I’m excited to intentionally spend a lot of time outside this year!

Can you spend nearly three hours a day outside?

It’s not too late to try this challenge! 🤗