Dining out with the kiddos

We took our kids out to eat the other night.  I think that any parent will tell you that dining out with children is an interesting experience to say the least.   Pat and I try to eat at home as much as possible, but we do enjoy the occasional restaurant meal.  That said, I think we often wonder why we thought it was a good idea to take our children out in public to eat.

 It is often not a relaxing experience for us.  We spend the majority of the time bribing, threatening and pleading with Evie to stay in her seat, while simultaneously shoving handfuls of Cheerios at Mitchell.   

We are both hyper aware of our children’s behavior when we are out, but Pat even more so because of his restaurant background.  His thoughts are always on other patrons and on making sure that our children do not negativity affect their dining experience.  It’s sounds kind of silly to say that we are worried about other people’s ‘dining experience’ when we are eating at places like Wendy’s or LaRosa’s since those places are family-friendly and usually full of commotion.  But even in non-fancy places, we want to teach our children proper etiquette for eating out.  It’s not that we don’t expect meltdowns, spilled cups and too loud voices.  We definitely do.  That’s why we usually go to dinner extremely early when taking the kids – so that we disturb the least amount of people.   

But you have to start somewhere so, even in places like McDonald’s, we tell Evie that she needs to stay in her seat and eat her meal.  It doesn’t always work and these days we are usually repeating ourselves 2 or 300 times.  And it’s obviously a little bit tougher with Mitch because he’s still so young and you can’t reason with a baby (hence, tons and tons of Cheerios).   We do the best we can, and if all else fails, we remove the kid(s) from the restaurant if necessary.  Luckily, the threat of having to go sit in the car while everyone else eats is usually enough to make Evie sit down and behave (at least for a little while).

The other night we went to Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner and, for the most part, it went ok.  This was in part due to the fact that they have a game system for trivia and other games so Evie was entertained most of the meal.  We normally don’t let her play on our phones or IPad at restaurants (although after seeing how good she was at BWW we may have to reconsider this).  Truthfully though, even when they are well-behaved, it’s still exhausting to take them out to eat.  Between 10 bathroom breaks (including one that, inevitably, needed to be taken as soon as our food came), three straws (to replace those dropped on the floor), a bubble mountain in Evie’s cup of milk, Mitchell flinging cereal everywhere, reaching for everything, and trying to climb out of the high chair, we went home more tired than when we came.  But at least we didn’t have to do any dishes!!