Friday, November 3, 2017

Day 3: Eating Out With Toddlers. And Living to Tell About It.



Every so often I see an article pop up in my social media news feeds about a certain restaurant taking a stand and banning kids from eating at their establishment.

As someone who loves to eat out, who also owns a kid, I find this really hard to accept. Banning kids from restaurants? What's next? Telling the elderly they can only eat at your establishment between certain hours?

I LOVE going to restaurants. Since Mr. KK and I got together, discovering new places to eat and drink has always been our thing

And then we had a baby.

And you know what happened?

We still went out to eat.

How? Because we raised a restaurant baby.

Our Little Mister (LM for short) made his first sojourn to a restaurant for lunch when we he was 3 weeks old. (Unless, of course, you count the lunch pit stop at the McDonald's outside of Andrews Air Force Base on our drive home from the hospital when he was 4 days old.)

A few years ago during NaBloPoMo, I wrote a post about bringing a baby to a restaurant

Now, two years later, here's an update with 15 steps of eating at a restaurant...the Toddler Edition.

1. Get excited over the fact that you're going out to eat. The set the bar for the evening really, really low.

2. Location, location, location. Find a neighborhood joint and make it your own. People who see you often are more likely to seat you quickly/accept your toddler/have pity on your with free drinks.

3. Pick a place with a decent noise level. It will help mask those lovely moments when your Toddler is "expressing himself".

4. Have a bag of tricks that won't quit. Bag should include – but not be limited to – snacks, stickers, crayons and coloring book, random rubber bands and paper clips, an iPad, a change of clothes, wet wipes, gum wrappers and miniature toys.

5. Order your adult beverage the minute you sit down. You may only have 10 minutes in which to drink it. If you can call and order your cocktail ahead, you should.

6. Embrace the high chair. At home your Toddler sits on a regular chair? Awesome. At school, he sits independently? That's cool. In a restaurant, where you want 7 minutes to eat your dinner without your child up and abandoning the table? Strap that kid in a high chair. Our motto: if he fits, he sits (strapped in).

7. Accept the fact that your toddler's dinner will be a carb fest. Order the grilled cheese and french fries, and ask them the bring the bread basket. Give him double veggies tomorrow.

8. Channel your inner Boy Scout and be prepared. Read the menu online, and know what you're going to order. Calculate the timing so that there is always food on the table.

9. Make sh*t up. One day at breakfast, our food was taking an crazy long time to come out, so I improvised the old 'shell game', and hid a straw wrapper under one of three creamer containers and had LM guess where it was.

10. Play the "it's still too hot to eat" game. One time, a grilled cheese needed to cool for twenty minutes before we could eat it, which allowed Mommy and Daddy to finish their appetizer and have their entrees arrive.

11. Recognize the meltdown before it happens. You know that hitch in their voice just before they are going to lose it, better than anyone else. Deploy master skills when a tantrum is on the horizon: Detect. Distract. Deflect.

12. Pretend it's no big deal. Toddlers are smart, in that they are learning to sense the situations in which you want them to behave. And then the do the opposite. When LM acts out loudly in a public place, I simple turn my head and start talking to Mr. KK. LM calls my name incessantly for two minutes, then finds something with which to busy himself. We drink and relax, he entertains himself. Win-win.

13. Don't be above the electronic babysitter. Just put the iPad on and enjoy your dinner. People may judge you, but they'd do worse if your toddler was screaming and ruining their dinner.

14. Be ready for the haters. Because you'll encounter them eventually. The dirty looks, the whispers under their breath, the requests to be seated at tables far away from you. Don't take it personally. Some people are just assholes.

15. Just let it go. He's going to yell. There will be food on the floor. People will look at you. Who cares? YOU are eating at a restaurant. 

But perhaps the best part about eating early with a Toddler, is that once they are in bed, you can enjoy cocktail hour part 2.

Cheers!

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