Family Time With the Murches

I just wanted to share how we do family time in case any of you are thinking of taking on an enormous home improvement project you might want to think about things like this. Here is panoramic snapshot of our "Friday night family time".
Our big project this weekend was gutters (more on this later). In order to start the project we needed materials and what better way to kill two birds with one stone (or two parents with one trip) than to combine family time with a trip to a home improvement store (store shall remain unnamed because it is NOT Lowes and I do not like it very much). In order to make the trip extra fun and keep the children somewhat calm, we first stopped at Wal-Mart to get a giant bag of popcorn and paper bags lunch bags in which to give each child their individual serving of popcorn. I thought this was a great idea, but apparently my middle born was not very happy because the popcorn was not accompanied by pink lemonade.
We somehow managed to walk to the store from the car only having to yell at a child one time for not listening and running out into the parking lot and almost getting hit. So far the trip was really turning out to be a smashing success. We made it into the store when all three children started to whine and cry saying they didn't want to be there. Oh, I forgot to mention that my oldest wanted to stay in the car because there was a radio program on that she wanted to listen to. Of course we had to tell her no since we were all going into the store together to enjoy some quality time as a family.
I won't bore you with all of the details of the trip. The highlights I would like to give are that home improvement stores are great places to go shopping with kids. We've picked up a few tips in our many travels there. The aisle are great, so much better than a dept. store or Wal-Mart. They are wide enough, so that when a child is throwing a temper tantrum on the floor there is plenty of space for other customers to walk around your child. You don't feel like you have to apologise for taking up the whole area. These big improvement stores also have great industrial shelving. It is almost like having monkey bars, only there are usually very heavy and dangerous merchandise on these shelves that could injure your child. We have found a few safe place to let them hang and swing on them. The insulation aisle is good place to start. During the spring and summer months the kids like to go into the garden department and pretend it's a jungle. I see this as a cultural field trip of sorts. It's as close to the jungle as we'll get for a long time.
So you can see there are plenty of opportunites to turn you potentially boring trip to a home improvement store into an exciting family event to be enjoyed by everyone. We had so much fun doing it I don't know if I can handle that much excitement again for a very, very, very, very long time. I hope you enjoy your next family time as much as we enjoyed ours.
I'm looking forward to writing about the gutters. We're just hoping it stops raining long enought to have time to put them up. Oh the irony of it all.