I feel like if you really want to be prepared for children, borrow a few sometime and go out to dinner with them. Most of the time, dining out with small children is nothing short of a painful experience. But then every now and then your kids will surprise you by being good in restaurants, and you will think to yourself, “Yes, we have made it – the days of holding our breaths walking into a dining establishment have passed us by.”
And your expectations will rise to, unbeknownst to you, unreasonable levels.
So a few days after Christmas, when my children were living on the mommy-has-cooked-too-much over the holidays diet of drinkable yogurts and dry cereal and I was still on a high from my last eating out experience where my kids somehow followed Mommy’s rules and actually ate, I got a surprise invitation to meet some friends out for dinner and jumped at the chance!
Even better was that it happened to be kids eat for a dollar night, so it should have been a total win-win. Given that the odds are good that at least one of my children will eat less than a dollar’s worth of food (i.e., nothing), the restaurant would totally get their money’s worth out of us, and I was suddenly off scot-free from meal planning for the evening!
In the famous words of Charlie Sheen … WINNING!
Off we go to dinner, each of the children toting a Christmas gift to show off, and me having done my best pre-public outing routine of inspirational parenting tips, like:
“You better eat everything on your plate or no dessert.”
“You will sit in your seat, the ENTIRE meal, period.”
“Both of you better behave or we will leave immediately, and I am not even kidding.”
I will give you a moment to guess how many of those directions my children were successfully able to follow. Let’s just say that it is nothing short of a post-Christmas miracle that we were not asked to leave the restaurant and never return. For dinner, Abby ate a bag of potato chips, which cost $1. A separate dollar than the one that her actual full plate of chicken and macaroni-n-cheese cost. Emma managed to eat her meal, most of it anyway, but I am not sure what seat she assumed I meant I expected her to sit in, because it certainly was not the chair holding her new sweater.
After the mom and I had finished handing the children their assorted requests for drinks, cutlery, napkins, sauces, more cutlery, etc. it dawned on me that the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears had surely been written by a mother … at least the porridge part had been. You know how the father bear’s porridge is too hot, yeah, no surprise that our husbands were half-way through their meal before we ever made it to our seats. And of course, baby bear’s porridge was just right, well, because, see above sentence for assorted requests. What was the mother bear’s porridge? Oh yeah, I remember now, it was too damned cold. At least for Goldilocks, anyway. I am sure the mother bear slurped it down gratefully, probably in about two seconds flat, just hoping that she could make it halfway through the bowl before precious little baby bear had another request for her.
I had a few momentary thoughts in between giving orders not followed or meeting requests from kids as we were sitting there, that we were totally those people in this restaurant. For even as family-friendly as it is (for God’s sake, they serve children for a dollar on Wednesdays), people were still trying to have a meal, you know, like in relative peace and quiet. I am pretty sure as the restaurant door was closing upon our exit I might have heard applause!
