I laughed out loud at this father's description of the hell it is to get kids out the door for an outing.

Here is father of three Tom Hodgkinson's account in Slate:

Before children, I just used to stroll out of the house. Now this process cannot be achieved without an hour of screaming, searching for lost socks and shoes, huffing, puffing, shouting, cursing Britax and their cruel inventions in the name of child safety. Then you have to find various toys that the children seem to find completely indispensable for the journey. Recently we made the terrible mistake of installing one of those DVD players in the back of the car, in the hope that it would keep the kids quiet on long journeys. It can help, I suppose, but the darned thing never seems to work properly, and fixing it is yet another task to add to the interminable torture of leaving the house.

Then the real hell begins. We start to drive to the theme park. The three children, tightly bound in the back of the car, start lashing out at one another. Each child has perfected his or her own uniquely irritating crying noise. Delilah's is a sort of constant mosquito whine mixed with helpless sobbing that apparently prevents her from being able to articulate the nature of her complaint. Arthur wails as if the world is about to end, and it's all so unfair and unjust. And Henry makes the sort of noises that the makers of The Exorcist would have been proud to feature in the movie. Both mother and father now start shouting. Mother wheels round and screams: "How many times do I have to tell you? Leave him alone!" Dad bellows: "Right, Arthur, one more time and there's no ice cream. I mean it." Dad anxiously glances in the rearview mirror to see what's going on. For a while I congratulate myself for not losing my temper. Then I suddenly break. I have been known to go berserk, to swear and bang the windshield in my rage. Then, if I lose my temper, Victoria takes this as her cue to seize the moral high ground and say something like, "We're fed up with you," thus driving me into a deeper rage, which cannot really be expressed well since we're all trapped in this blessed motor car.

Perhaps this is the difference between having three versus two children or even a difference in the personalities of parents, but where he loses me is at the end when he pontificates the wonderfulness of simply staying home.

Despite the hell it is to get kids out the door, I find it so convenient to kill a couple hours at a theme park or even a walk around the block in the evening, which is what we've been doing to kill time before bedtime. The cabin fever, for me, was so awful when I first became a parent.

I think my problem is I simply do not know how to entertain, let's say, a toddler. Or, perhaps I am not into the activities my children are. Activities like coloring and playing transformers -- which I will do -- I find numbingly boring. I like board games and am looking forward to Ari and Eli getting into those. In the meantime, what am I to do? Leave the house with the kids.

What say you about Hodgkinson's article? How do you spend your time with your children? I would especially love tips on fun things to do with two-year-olds.