A Welcome Day Out

My family and I have slipped into a nice weekend routine if Friday is considered to be a part of a weekend, that is.

We have always held weekends, the Saturdays and Sundays, too close to our hearts. Precious. Let's use them judiciously. Plan them well. We used to tell ourselves. The planning killed all the joy the free days bring.

What we recently realised was that we need not do that if we make the fullest use of our Friday evenings. That's what we have been doing for more than a month now. We leave our homes and go to some place. Gardens. Malls. Restaurants. Movies. A drive. Any place, but home. The change in surroundings is precisely what we need to forget the work week. Time at the office for us. Time at school for our daughter.

Amidst the hustle and bustle of the outside city life, we forget all our troubles.

Yesterday was no different. We had an evening show of Superman at IMAX, a DC movie I had no plans of watching in a theatre initially. I have been burned by the production house multiple times over the past few years. So you can't blame me. But we watched the trailer together a few hours before the movie and loved the bright and fun vibe it had, especially my daughter. So with the hope that the movie lives up to the promise of the trailer, we booked the tickets and off we went.

And boy, did we have fun.

It isn't a great movie. But the shift towards a lighter tone was welcome. Maybe the movie's politics has polarised people. But it is a good, fun watch.

A dinner family date at McDonald's after ages followed. We tried everything we had never tried before. So the experiment wasn't successful. Burgers were too gooey and spicy. The fries were too cheesy and spicy. The float was icy terrible – thankfully, it wasn't spicy.

We spent a good hour in Crosswords, the bookstore, next. My daughter enjoys roaming around in the aisles of books, searching for a new one. She always has a book in mind, and one that she decides on the fly. This day, it was no different.

As Friday came close to the end, the struggles of the workweek were out of our minds. And we were ready for the weekend.

Knock on the wood, but we are in love with this Friday routine.