Parenting brings many joys. This afternoon for reasons that remain obscure we decided to take the Whole Family to the mall. It was a hideous experience. The smaller progeny thought it was a giant playground and behaved accordingly -- do you know, if you are a small person and decide to take off running and screaming your head off in JC Penney, as soon as you duck into the little forests of clothes on racks, it's next to impossible for your grownups to catch you? See, you can just run under all the hung-up clothes, while your grownups must buffalo awkwardly through the forest of cut-rate fashion.
It was fun watching the 17-Year-Old get hit on by a Boy while we were waiting to buy stuff at CVS, though. Not least because she was buying feminine hygiene items which she quite coolly slipped to her stepfather as he approached the counter, utilizing a nice behind-the-back underhand motion. 17-Year-Olds are not always noted for such aplomb. As for the stepfather, he refrained from loudly asking her "so, you get the right sized pad then?" Clearly, he too deserves kudos.
Then we went to Outback Steakhouse for dinner, because at Christmas my brother and sister-in-law gave us a gift card for that establishment. It was a hellish ordeal, because we brought the whole family. Children, eating out, gah. The highlight? When the 3-Year-Old declared she had to go to the bathroom and then ran for it, leaving her father to take off in hot pursuit, only to see her disappear into the Ladies' Room, where he could not follow. As the door closed she yelled at the top of her lungs, "Daddy I'm a BIG GIRL!" -- followed, inevitably, by the unmistakable sounds of her cries of dismay as she tried to keep her scrawny little butt from falling into the toilet bowl, a problem she often encounters, being in fact much smaller than she thinks she is. The woman who was in there at the time came out laughing her damn head off, though in fairness I suppose the sight of me banging my noggin into the wall might have been genuinely entertaining. But seeing her whole table then proceed to toast me as I repeatedly and desperately yelled "HURRY UP!" into the women's bathroom was, I am sure, just a bit over the top.
On the way home the 3-Year-Old asked, "can we go to the eat-store again tomorrow?" It was certainly adorable that her term for "restaurant" is "eat-store," but the answer to her question, shouted in unison by Molly I & I, was "NO. NOT IN A MILLION BLOODY YEARS."
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2 comments:
I'm troubled by the juxtaposition of feminine hygiene and "eat-store" in this post.
But that's for another blog.
Funny, my daughter used to call restaurants "eating stores" too. And a trip to an eating store with her is an undiluted hell.
The person I feel worst for after a trip to the restaurant is whoever has to come and clean our table area.
Once, we left a skyline chili (where Grandpa took us) only to discover that several noodles had not only made it onto my daughter's chair, but also to have been ground into the knees of her pants as she squirmed around.
If she's not dropping a crayon under the table and darting down to get it, she's invading your personal space as you eat by scooting herself progressively across the booth, she's touching your shirt with sauce covered fingers, she's complaining that she wanted juice and you got her milk, she's trying to fish ice cubes out of your cup with same saucy fingers, she's switching whether she wants to sit on one side of the table with daddy or the other side of the table with mommy, she's leaning her hair forward into her food, or she's rejecting the food outright as too salty/hot/funny tasting.
Yes, a trip to the restaurant is a joy.
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