Many of you are going to wonder if we are the most boring family in the universe, but in some endearing way I really like our friday nights. We have just a couple of weekly traditions in our family, sunday brunch and then beavertail (Jamestown, RI) for some jumping on the rocks... and then friday night grocery shopping! We make it an event by piling everyone into the car, picking a universally fun place to eat and then topping it all of with grocery shopping.
The good thing is that on any given friday night the grocery store is usually empty so we tend to kind of take over the place, two carts (ok, sometimes we are kind of loud) one cart is the entertainment cart and the other fills the weeks shopping. This simple fun, handles a weekly chore but gets everyone involved. I would say that the only pitfall is you usually come home with a few weird items, but I think it is sometimes fun for the kids to try what they pick out by themselves (I can assure you we don't let them go wild and pick just 'anything') and if you are already at Whole Foods or something like this there is usually not much damage that can be done.
I like to find the fun in a simple thing like this, I think that we can get stuck in doing big events all the time with our kids, like movies, shows, and museums. I just think that for kids, they don't really care as long as everyone is doing something together and it doesn't always need to be a costly spectacle, and most of the time it's the most simple things that they find the best. We try to put the same kind of family fun into raking leaves and household chores but somehow the kids don't really last that long.
One more nice thing about Grocery Night is that at the end of the night you usually have two totally pooped out kids sleeping in the back seat of the car!