Eating together at the table was a given when we were kids.

We didn’t have HD TVs, Netflix, or the power of the internet at our fingertips. We just sat down, talked about the day, and enjoyed the time we had together.

Things are different now.

If your family is anything like ours, then getting everyone together for dinner is probably a nightly battle that you’re just about ready to stop fighting. Pulling the kids away from their computers is worse than pulling teeth, and even when you can get them to eat at the table, their eyes are glued to a screen while they scroll through social media sites in a zombie-like state.

We noticed this trend in our household and decided to do something about it. But before we tell you the solution, we need to give you a bit of backstory about what we value as a family.

You’ve already gathered that we value our time together more than anything else. We know that our kids won’t stay at home forever, so we do everything we can to cherish the time we have with them while they’re young. We’ve supported them at recreational sports games, invested in music lessons, and helped them with math homework we barely understand.

We also take them to the range to help them understand the importance of gun safety.

That’s a controversial statement these days, but we don’t care. We don’t think it should be. 

In our home, we believe that firearms should be treated with care and respect, and that’s one more value we’ve talked to our kids about since day one. We took them to the range when they were old enough to start learning how to handle a weapon, and we plan on giving them their own firearms when they’re old enough for that, too.

We cherish our time together at the range. The kids don’t have time to play with their phones, for one. More importantly, they leave feeling more confident, empowered, and safe. It’s a special kind of family bonding that you don’t come across every day.

When we decided to do something about our dinner table dilemma, we started by thinking about how we could get them excited to eat together. We thought about creating custom placemats, but we knew that they’d probably be ruined within a few months. We also tried having them cook with us to make them feel like a part of the action — they were far from enthusiastic about that one.

Everything changed when we asked them to create personalized firearm art from the Personal-Prints catalog.

We made the whole project a family event and created each piece together. Like we said earlier, we’ve taught our kids about gun safety from a very early age. This means that they’re also familiar with quite a few different firearms. We had a blast picking out backgrounds and choosing letters made with firearms and ammunition they recognized.

Our dining room is almost a perfect square. Every seat at the table has a wall behind it, and that’s right where we had everyone hang their own personalized print.

Things didn’t change overnight, but we noticed that our kids felt more excited about coming to dinner than they did before. After a couple of weeks, we were having family dinners just like we did before the kids were obsessed with their phones and video games.

We know that our family dinners aren’t going to last forever.

We know that our kids will grow up, go off to college, and start families of their own. There’s no getting around the fact that change is the only constant in life.

The fact that our family dinners are going to end one day doesn’t make us sad. When the kids are gone, we’ll still have their firearm art on the wall to remind us of the time we had together.

And who knows, maybe one day we’ll give them their prints to hang up in their own dining rooms when their kids won’t sit down for dinner. What we do know is that the Firearm Guns Name Art print from Personal-Prints brought our family closer together and showed our kids the value of eating together every night.

You can’t put a price on that.