A great night in with the girls

It’s not easy fitting a social life around the kids, but if you don’t make the effort it’s hard to keep in touch with even the closest of friends. Right now, you might feel like you don’t need anything more in your life than your partner and your kids, but that’s being short-sighted. Pretty soon, your children will start to have their own social lives (ok, if they’re babies this may be a while off yet, but it will happen eventually) and you don’t want to have lost the connection you’ve had with lifelong friends simply because you can’t make time for them now.

One way to make it easier to be social is to get friends to come over for the evening – or fix up a rota so that you go to each other’s houses. This takes the pressure off having to dress up for a night out, and you’ll also end up spending a lot less money on the time spent together, which is always a bonus.

So what to do for a night ‘in’ with the girls? There are lots of options, of course, but online bingo is an easy, fun and value for money choice.

We’ve all seen the TV ads for bingo sites like Jackpotjoy and Foxy Bingo, and there are hundreds more to choose from online, including big brand names like Mirror Bingo and Gala Bingo. If you sign up to play bingo at Mirrorbingo.com, not only do you get a 300% bonus when you put £10 into an account, but you also get access to free games on the schedule. You and your friends can get together for a bingo night; with everyone bringing their phone or tablet along so you can all play the same games together at once.

Of course, you could go down to a bingo hall to do the same thing, but that would involve having to get there (a drive or bus journey), paying for food and drinks while you’re there and, probably most crucially, having to share your night with your mates with a room full of strangers. There’d be pressure on everyone to be quiet during the games (so the other players could hear the number calls) and it just wouldn’t be as relaxing as playing in one of your homes.

Playing bingo online means you get to be as loud as you like, and pay as much attention to the games as you feel like. The beauty of playing online is that if you happen to have picked a winning ticket, there’s no need to worry about registering a win – this happens automatically, thanks to the software that runs the game. Of course, there are no guarantees that anyone will win, but a few games of bingo with a group of friends is always great entertainment value whatever happens. You can feel pretty competitive during the game, but at the end of the day there’ll be no hard feelings if one of your friends wins as it’s all down to chance.

Sometimes, even when you arrange a night with friends, you might feel frazzled at the end of the day and not feel like being sociable, but go ahead and do it anyway, and you’ll soon realise why it was worth making the effort.