Dining Out

Now that it's darker in the morning, Wayne is finishing up his marathon training by running some evenings -- this night was one of them. So I decided it would be a good night to take the girls birthday gift shopping for a party Marissa's going to on Saturday, then take them out to eat.

It's been a while since we've taken the girls out to eat, and with good reason. We work hard on manners, on actually eating our food and not playing with it, that restaurants are not places to play tag, etc. Now it was time to take those lessons to test in a REAL restaurant: Perkin's.

For the most part they did well, and it helped that they were actually starving because it meant that when our food came they went to town. And they've learned from their daddy that Perkin's means breakfast 24 hours a day, so both of them ordered the french toast tower for dinner.

Halfway through our dinner an older couple sat in the booth behind us. After they'd been there about 10 minutes the gentleman looks behind him at whose sitting right behind him, and I realize that Lindsey's constant movement (really? not Lindsey...) has clearly been reverberating through the booth and disturbing him. So I ask her for the billionth time to sit still, please, not slump, and not stand up, and certainly not leap up and land with her feet under her butt on the seat of the booth.

She tries to oblige, but the "blue water" drink that came just before the actual food (and is Sprite with blue food coloring in it) is full of sugar that's hyping her up and she is unable to sit still. So she starts nibbling on her bacon that came with her french toast tower. She seems to be eating just fine, and then suddenly she starts choking. Well, instead of actually biting off pieces of bacon she'd been nibbling it up, and ultimately it was still one single piece of bacon in her mouth. So she spits it out onto the table, breaks it apart and begins to eat the pieces one by one. At which point I hear myself say something I don't believe I've ever said before:

"Lindsey! We do not re-eat food that we've spit out. Put that down!"

We? WE? As if somewhere in this country there is someone for whom that is acceptable behavior.

Don't Google it, I'm sure you'll find some case of some tribe somewhere who regurgitates food to give it to their young, but no thanks, still not acceptable here.

Better yet not five minutes later Marissa, who had eaten her bacon the same way, also begins to choke with chipmunk cheeks full of bacon. I end up holding out a napkin for her to spit her bacon out into and scrunching the napkin up into a ball. I feel sorry for whomever has to clean our table and hope to God the napkins on the table stay scrunched up when they pick them up.

As we left I apologized to the couple behind us if we had disturbed them. The woman smiled and said, "No apology, we have grandchildren too," but the man looked clearly annoyed.

I'm sure he lost his appetite as soon as he overheard me telling my child not to "re-eat" her food.

And just for a kicker, Lindsey did indeed ask if she and I could play tag while waiting for our food. But just from her side of the booth to mine, not all over the restaurant because she knows she can't do THAT anymore.