Fridays were the best day of the week when I was growing up

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Childhood was so long ago, but it often feels like yesterday. My mom and I were reminiscing not long ago about when my brother and I were kids. My brother and I always looked forward to Fridays when we were kids. Not just because it was the weekend and we were off of school for the weekend, but because every Friday we'd go out to eat and then do our grocery shopping, and when my dad's parents were alive we'd stop and see them after we got groceries (my mom liked having it as an excuse that we had to get the groceries home so we could leave quickly as my dad's parents apartment was always full of smoke because his whole side smoked and she hated breathing it in). My dad would pick us up from school and then head to town to get my mom from work, and we'd go to a town further south of us to get groceries. At that time, our town didn't have a Meijer or Aldi (both have been built in our town since then). My brother and I started playing a game where we baby-talked for the fun of it, and it drove my dad nuts, which made us do it more. He would get irritated, and my mom would join in and drive him crazier. He couldn't very well threaten us when she was doing it too. We weren't doing it in a this is how we like to talk way, but in a let's make it an amusing game kind of way. I honestly don't remember how it started. I just remember my dad, who was normally very patient, hated it and would yell at us. Going out to eat was a treat, and we only did it on grocery days and special occasions. Most of the time we went to Burger King, but sometimes we went to Denny's or Ryan's. We were out all day, as we only went shopping once a week, so there was no time to cook when we got home, which is why grocery day was so fun for us. We got to eat out, and when we went grocery shopping, my parents let us each pick out a cereal and a snack at Aldi. We honestly didn't get name-brand cereal often unless there was a sale going on, and then we would stock up. We also went to Hills sometimes, and we'd get a soft pretzel. We used to occasionally get a free Hill's soft pretzel coupon when my brother or I won the outstanding student award from school for behavior, and we both won several over the years, because for the most part, we were well behaved kids and that meant we'd both get a pretzel because my parents would buy the other one a pretzel and use the coupon for the kid that earned it. We also got excited over Pizza Hut's book-it program. My brother should thank me for all of the pizzas he got over the years because we'd go, and I'd get my free personal pan pizza, and they'd buy him one too. Meijer meant penny horse rides, which I loved when I was little; they still have the horse at most stores despite the US no longer making pennies. My son also enjoyed the horse ride over the years. When we went to Kroger, that meant my brother and I got to rent movies. My parents hit every grocery store to get all of the sales, which is why we were out for so long. Back in the 90s, Kroger had a whole movie rental section. They used to have a two-for-a-dollar special, and my brother and I both got to pick a movie to watch. On nights that we went home from grocery shopping with rented movies, we typically got pizza from East of Chicago, and that would be dinner. It just depended on whether or not my parents wanted to watch a movie with us. These were usually the days we stayed in town and just went to Churchill's, Foodtown, and Kroger in our own town. We would sometimes alternate between the two. If we went to the town further south, that's when we visited my dad's parents. My mom had us say hello to our grandparents and then had us go and play on the playground behind their apartment building, so we weren't breathing in smoke. We would come back a while later to head home, and we were made to give our grandparents hugs goodbye. Friday nights for us were magical, even though a lot of it was spent grocery shopping, there was fun thrown in. We lived in a small country town about 20 minutes from the town my mom worked in, and we later went to school in (we had an elementary school in our town, but the jr. high and high school were in this other city), so a trip into town was always exciting to us. Our tiny town had a population of about 200, and the only thing to do was to play at our small park, and for a while, we had a little carryout. We lived about 5 miles from the next town over (another small town but bigger than ours, and a different school district), and my brother and I would often ride our bikes to the library there. Friday and the weekend in general were always fun for us. There was always something to do, and we were very rarely bored.