The Largest Family U Picnic 2016

It was late Saturday (12 March) afternoon when we arrived at the island’s largest family picnic held at Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park River Plains on Saturday (12 March). This signature event by NTUC U Family was originally planned for October 2015 but was postponed due to the awful unhealthy haze conditions. Thankfully, it was a lovely sunny evening for a family picnic. When we arrived at 6pm, hundreds of families had already settled on the lawn.

This is the third year that NTUC U Family has organized the picnic to create a platform for families to bond and spend quality time together. The theme is ‘Space Odyssey’ as the organizers hope to encourage families to look ahead to a positive future for themselves and their children. We collected our intergalactic-themed picnic bag, which is packed with goodies and worth more than $40, and moved on to find a good spot at the park to picnic on.

Many of the families had come prepared with packed savoury picnic food like pasta, sushi, chicken wings and beehoon. They smelt great and our eyes lingered gluttonously. Luckily, our intergalactic picnic bag offered up some goodies — a bottle of water, cans of tuna and salmon with crackers, seaweed peanuts, potato chips and honey stars cereal. Ok, so mostly junk food and I am not going to win gourmet picnic mom of the year, but whew! What a life saver!

I rounded up the kids to check out the many activities to encourage family bonding. They immediately zoomed in on the ‘Moonwalking’ activity, which requires the kids to put on Kangoo Jump rebound shoes (see picture below) and run or jump in.

I am always amazed by how quickly the kids get the hang of a new activity or experience. They had such a great 15-minute trying out this activity.

There were plenty of games for the kids with intergalactic names like Robo-Claw Race (a relay race), Planet 51 (an inflatable playground), bungee trampoline and Space Launcher.

Kids could also collect mission badges, star gaze and meet roving space creatures and astronauts.Most of these activities were for kids 6 years old and over and the queues for the activity were quite long. (see picture below)

Creative families who dressed up could win ‘Best Dressed Space Explorers Contest’ or take part in the ‘Best Anti-Gravity Photo Contest’. My family was one of the lucky few who got selected on stage to play a family game. That’s us at the far right!

The fun part of playing games as a family is to figure out how we work together as a family. We had to assemble the alphabets of the words that the Emcee (Jo Augustine) told us to. There were three families on stage. The first family to form the words will win. The final set of the game was to piece together a word with the most alphabets.  We did not win. But it was a good opportunity to teach my kid (I shall not name who) about sportsmanship and that winning is nice, and being in second place is not the end of the world.

Meeting local celebrity DJ Jo Augustine was a highlight of the event. He was very nice and friendly. At the end of the game, he was obliging enough to take a photo with us.

By nightfall, the music was pumping and the atmosphere of the night is one of wholesome fun. The kids were hungry and even though there was an exciting lineup of outer space activities and dazzling performances like a cosmic LED dance performance and a spectacular stage performance by Singapore’s very own Lady Gaga look-alike, we decided to call it a night.

Thank you, U Family for the invitation to a great family outing.

WHERE in Singapore do You picnic with your family? Share with Us in the comments below what family-bonding activities do your family engage in. We will love for you to connect with Us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.