The Restaurant Blues

We began taking Daniel out to restaurants when he was about 2 weeks old. Sure, it was June. The balmy nights made it easy for us to justify our need to get out of the house. Pumpernicks was a favorite dining-with-Daniel destination in those early days. Daniel slept through most of these dinners, snug in his infant seat. Peter and I used to look at each other across the table and say, "Boy, this sure is easy!" In fact, we've been lucky enough to enjoy relatively incident-free dinners out with Daniel ever since then. Now that he's a toddler, however, the confines of a high chair are not at the top of his "places to spend time with Mom and Dad" list.

It has become increasingly more difficult to take Daniel out to restaurants for dinner. Not only does he want to escape from his high chair, but he wants to touch everything on the table -- silverware, condiment bottles, salt shakers, menus, sugar packets, etc. You get the idea. If you take something away from him (say, after he's chewed through a creamer cup, thereby causing creamer to spill down the front of his shirt) he freaks out. The rest of the meal becomes a guessing game for me and Peter. Daniel reaches out his arm and whines, and we frantically try to anticipate what will satisfy him. "Do you want the straw? How about the napkin?" We are rarely correct. Most of the time, I'm convinced not even Daniel knows what he wants.

We become so consumed with keeping him happy and calm, one of us inevitably neglects the meal and ends up eating next to nothing. The dinner ends with us looking wearily at one another as if to say, "Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?" It's not fun. You'd think we'd have learned our lesson more quickly. But we always gave Daniel the benefit of the doubt because he is so well-behaved. Despite the annoyance of enduring a meal with his whining and fidgeting, he is still one of the most pleasant and cooperative babies I've encountered. We're lucky. At least we got to go out with him at all. I suppose there are some people who are just homebound with their young children because they can't imagine sitting through a meal with them in a public place.

Interestingly enough, dinner seems to be the only meal that presents a real problem. We've continued to take him out for breakfast and lunch, and the disruptions are much less frequent. But for now, Peter and I have chosen to go out to dinner only when a babysitter is available. We're more relaxed, we can enjoy our food, and Daniel can run around and shout to his heart's content.