What if you make a game at home, where every X day(s), everybody spends 30 minutes talking only in Japanese (set a timer!)? You can call it “the help mummy talk better game”. During that time, encourage your kids and husband to talk even to each other only in Japanese so you can listen in and join if you feel like it. The rest of the time you all can get back to English, but this way you’ll still get daily/weekly/regular practice.
Thats a great idea! 
we do go to inlaws pretty often. Once every week or two weeks so we always speak Japanese only there pretty much. I just feel i’m only sticking to basic sentences and I could do with being able to express more complicated ideas. I’m looking forward to getting better so I can talk politics with MIL. We try but I have to look up every other word 
Alternately, you can pick a day where y’all will only speak in Japanese, and even when you ask what something is they’d have to reply to you in Japanese. troll face
But that’s hard mode. Start with 30 minutes over a meal or something, preferably every day, and things will get better gradually. (tl;dr, make your children earn their keep extra troll face)
I’d recommend also getting a tutor that you can talk to and listen to, and maybe read things with. I have a couple of iTalki tutors, and they’re priceless. You can do with tutors things you can’t really do in class, such as roleplaying and repeating grammar points until you nail them down, and it’s all done in your own pace.
Really depends on each person as we’re all at different learning speed but I’d say judge from your N5 score and try a N3 mock test. If you do ok-ish then a focus heavily on your weak points.
Myself - I’m not in Japan but I have a Japanese husband who’s very good at English and I have one very young child. My husband is not a teacher so everything is self study for me. I’m hoping to take N3 soon but I think the difference between N5 and N3 is quite different but might be do-able for your case.
My husband doesn’t talk much in Japanese (answers back in English agh!!!) so I don’t get much listening. I took N3 last year and thought I completely failed listening (I couldn’t catch 3 questions and guessed!) but strangely my listening had the highest score! So you could be surprised. 
I might had done better is my kid let me sleep that night - I was falling asleep while waiting for listening to start. ^^;;;;
I’m considering that from April. The class I go to is run by the prefecture and they also have people who volunteer to tutor. My mother in law is actually a volunteer but has a student at the moment and we live a bit far from one another. The school can assign me a tutor free, so i’d be silly not to take that up!
Thanks for all the good advice and encouragement 
You can use Skype to chatter with your MIL and read NHK easy together to catch up with the news. nodnods
Anyway, good luck!! It sounds like you have the motivation and the means, so I’m sure you’ll reach your goals.
Haha me too! My kid has only just turned 3 but I don’t have any family nearby so that’s me busy until school starts! 
I used to just study all day long!
Is your kids bilingual btw? Mine is still not talking though saying some words (in Japanese). My husband just answers back in English when I talk in Japanese and my son talks in Japanese when I talk to him in English - I give up! 
I started from shaky N5/N4 in February last year and did N3 in December. No results yet but I feel positive.
It should definitely be possible.
Yes my eldest is pretty bilingual…he can also read faster than me now (in Japanese) 
sometimes he even corrects me That said he mostly only spoke English single words until around 26 months where he made English sentences and probably wasn’t until 30-32 months before Japanese sentences. His understanding in Japanese was also very limited as his dad was working a lot. They are all different though. My youngest totally understands both English and Japanese really well but at almost 24 months he barely speaks either. Just the odd word here and there and we still have to guess a lot of what he means
Thanks for telling me! I’ve been a bit concerned and just thought it was him being a boy plus being in a mixed language environment. I’ve recently worked out he’s been saying jitensha lately but saying “ji-sha!”. It’s quite cute.
I’ve had been to some Japanese mother and toddler groups in the past and there’s been 3 year old boys who haven’t been talking either.
Well done for bringing them up with both languages though, it’s a wonderful gift for them!
I have a very similar goal to your’s which is to be able to communicate better (and actually similar situation though I don’t live in Japan, I’m not a parent but work full time, been doing JLPTs along the other SRSs, my spouse is not pushing me to learn either but we speak English full time except around her family which I only occasionally Facetime or visit).
In my experience, I’d say that WK and JLPT has had a minimum impact on improving my actual communication skills given the time invested (aside from listening drills). Bunpro is better as a productive input for translation so I can communicate new grammar more efficiently but it has limitations in JLPT prep because it’s not a comprehension layout nor simulates test taking scenarios. I think for SRS to work in my favor, either KameSame or going through the new Kitsun JLPT decks with jp>eng + eng>jp will connect what I really need best for spoken vocab building. Kitsun is great because there are so many ways to shape learning and far superior to any Anki I’ve dealt with. But SRSing and JLPTing is time consuming and generally separate from communication practice (but at least my reading/vocab has certainly improved).
The greatest benefit for communication for me has been language partners and italki lessons. I don’t like classrooms anymore, specially if time is valuable because there is often alot of wasted time I find. I’d rather do a private lessons where I get much more interaction. Honestly, I’m sort of at a crossroads as I wait for the JLPT results and not entirely pleased with my communication progress lately and what I want to do for 2020. Since you live in Japan, you probably have alot more opportunities to exercise your new found studies so perhaps you can find more efficiencies than I’ve experienced.
I am not sure its my place to give any advice to you as you probably might not need it but I thought as someone who also wishes to improve their pronunciation I could offer a resource. There is a guy on YouTube named Dogen (Link to the channel) who has some funny videos about the Japanese intonations and various other things, however, aside from those he also offers a patreon account, in which if you pay the $10 a month fee, gives you Japanese phonetic lessons which (from what his subscribers and various other YouTube channels say) are very good.
I know you have to pay for this resource but it might be something worth looking into if you are struggling with pronunciations and intonations (please note I’m not saying you are, just stating this in case someone reading this is).
I don’t personally use it quite yet as I need to get better at a lot more of the basics of the language before I can fully work on my pronunciation, so again maybe this advice is misplaced, just thought it might be helpful to some people.
Best of luck to you in your studies!
I’ve been following Dogen’s channel and I like it. I thought his motivations for phonetic work is interesting given it stemmed from public speaking goals (comedy) I believe. Kaz had Steve Kaufmann (polyglot) on his channel and he was sort of critical of Dogen because he felt that degree of phonetic ability is not essential (which is true) but I don’t think he knew his original motive. If you ever hear Dogen switch between English and Japanese, his overall pitch is way different, almost like his phonetic work is an extension of voice acting (not that it’s disingenuous or anything).
I like Steve, but he is solidly in the “dabble in tons of languages without trying to master any” camp. Which is fine if that’s what people want to do. I guess he’s just trying to avoid people assuming you need to go super in depth to just take a vacation somewhere and talk a bit, but I doubt anyone is subscribing to Dogen while they are just dabbling in Japanese.