Friday nights have long been associated with good times: Happy Hours, date nights, movie premieres. Through the years I’ve looked forward to events like those, but lately, my Fridays are more about popcorn and pajamas than pomp and circumstance.

In our home, Friday nights are reserved for movies with my boys, and it’s my favorite thing.

We starting doing these events on a whim and they’ve continued for years now. They are sacred. On Friday mornings the boys and I dance around and sing (to the tune of Kool & the Gang’s “Ladies’ Night”) “Oh it’s movie night! And it’s popcorn night! And it’s pizza night! Oh what a night!”

Recently I asked the kids if they wanted to do a special (read: different) event on some upcoming Friday, and they were shocked. “But that’s movie night! We like movie night better than anything else!” they proclaimed.

We stayed in.

The Friday festivities begin when right away when we get home. I make popcorn – the real stuff, popped on the stove and topped with butter and sea salt – and the fragrance fills the house: Movie Night has begun.

We quickly slip into pajamas and pile on the couch, bowls of popcorn in our laps, cuddled together in blankets and pillows. After some negotiations, we select a movie and let it roll. My boys and I munch away and watch the feature presentation. At some point I make pizza and we have dinner together in front of the screen. Not a culinary high-point for the week, but it’s terrific all the same.

I have to admit, some weeks the “film” of choice is not exactly Academy Award level entertainment. We go through stretches of kid-approved sequels like ‘The Buddy” films which feature five golden retriever puppies that talk (at least to each other and other animals) and have silly adventures, like stowing away on a space shuttle and sneaking off to solve an archaeological mystery in Egypt. They are badly written in the way that so many kid movies are, but they are also sweet and I have to admit, pretty adorable. Nobody shoots anyone or really even raises their voice and good always triumphs over evil, which in today’s times, is refreshing.

Some weeks I feel distracted and restless. An unseen force pulls me into the kitchen to empty the dishwasher that I never got to that morning, or I’m sucked into the rabbit hole of videos on my phone.

But my boys are adamant: “Mom!” They call from the couch. “The movie is still on!” and I tear myself away from my time wasting and rejoin them on the couch.

Often my younger son will cuddle in close, putting his head in my lap and allowing me to stroke his soft, blond hair, and his big brother tucks his feet under my leg. The three of us are as close as we ever are these days. As close as we may ever be again. We talk through the movie, nobody really cares what’s happening, and their questions are funny and revealing. Sometimes we discuss important plot points such as if a dog could really fly an airplane or which is a better superpower: Invisibility or Making Webs? (The answers are: Yes, maybe it could, and invisibility is better.)

No matter what’s on the screen, we are together, and I often blissfully doze off, waking with a small snore that makes my boys giggle. Occasionally neither of them makes it through to the end of the show, and my husband and I scoop them up, warm and floppy in the deep slumber of childhood, and carry them upstairs. “I love you, goodnight…” they mumble as we tuck them into their beds.

More and more, life and the world encroaches our end-of-the-week fortress of film. The feature presentation starts later because the boys want to use their Kindles first; birthday parties or other adult obligations interrupt the schedule, and we sometimes do ‘Makeup’ movie nights on Saturday instead, but it’s not the same.

I know these moments, like all of the years with young children, are fleeting. My boys will start to drift away from our ritual, opting instead for sleepovers or football games or – gasp – date nights of their own.

Perhaps then my husband and I will reclaim the couch, selecting movies made for grown-ups. We will create a new Friday Night ritual of our own. I will inevitably doze off partway through, dreaming of the nights when the couch was the center of our universe, and my little boys wanted nothing more than to have me close, and maybe a little more popcorn.

For now, I’ll suffer through puppies and animated snails and a slightly diminished social life for this chance to be with them. In the best seat in the house, on my favorite night of the week. Just my boys and me.

This essay originally appeared in Fete Lifestyle Magazine in October 2019.