Dinner Out

Today I thought I would post about a fairly typical dinner out for us. Maybe some day I'll put this on a scrapbook page. We got to Chili's at around 6:25PM, right after church. We got seated right away. DD always insists on sitting next to me and DH and I try to sit next to DS#3 so he can eat from our plates. We order drinks--strawberry lemonade for me, DS#2, and DS#3, Sprite for DS#1, chocolate milk for DD, and a Presidente Margarita for DH. DH wanted to go ahead and order our food also, but we weren't fully decided on whether or not to get an appetizer, so the server goes to get the drinks first.

When he gets back, I order the Grilled Salmon to share with DD. DS#1 gets the Jalapeno Smokehouse Bacon Big-Mouth Burger with no mayo no lettuce no tomato and no onion. Try saying all of that ten times fast. :) DH orders the Kickin' Jack Nachos with Fajita Chicken and DS#2 orders the Pepper Pals Pasta for kids with Alfredo Sauce and Cinnamon Apples on the side. It always seems like a long wait to get our food but it really wasn't that long. DS#2 and I managed to drink our first servings of strawberry lemonade, though.

I gave about half of my salmon to DD who refuses any of the rice or veggies on my plate. She did eat all of her salmon, though, and wanted more. DS#2 devours his pasta in seconds then he proceeds to eat some of the salmon I offer him, maybe about a fourth of my original salmon or more. I don't have very much salmon left so DD has to make do with what I've already given her. Meantime, DS#3 has eaten one bite of my rice and refuses anything else. He wants some of DS#2's noodles but there isn't any left. For once I think DS#1 and DH are the two last ones to finish their meals.

We don't JUST eat at dinner, despite the above description. We talk about DS#1 spending Sunday night with me at work since then I could take him straight to Summer Camp from there. Actually, the enticement is that we could also have breakfast at IHOP before camp. The drawback is that there is a flurry of activity near the on-call sleep rooms by around 6AM and overhead announcements all night long, plus sleeping in a new place. No firm decision was made yet, but I think he's leaning towards sleeping in his own bed.

There's plenty of joking around. We talk about how the boys need their hair cut. DS#1 calls DS#2 "special, very special" which for some reason he finds so funny that he shoots Sprite out of his nose. I have to hand him a napkin because he is leaking Sprite into his hand. I talk about how we don't have a portable camera anymore and that I need to take a picture for today and DS#1 leaking Sprite out of his nose would have been perfect. DS#2 suggests that we reenact the scene at home by putting Sprite all over DS#1's nose and then taking a picture.

DS#2 talks about stuff that really doesn't make any sense. He states that DS#3 has to learn more family names than DS#1 did at the same age because there used to only be DH, DS#1 and me, but now DS#3 has three siblings and more cousins. He then starts asking what DS#1 used to call him when DS#1 was DS#3's age but then backtracks when he realizes that he (DS#2) wasn't born yet when DS#1 was DS#3's age. Sometimes I get really tired listening to my children talk because of all of the convoluted reasoning. :-)

As I mentioned earlier, the food could not have taken long to come out to us because we were walking out of the restaurant after having paid the bill at around 7:05PM. That's only 40 minutes and all of us finished pretty much everything on our plates!

When we got home the family was watching some Sci-Fi Channel show called "Warehouse 13" so I started playing with the manual settings on my camera while they were distracted. I was having a difficult time focusing on faces because the lighting in my house is so bad. I managed to get this decent photo of DS#3 resting his head while playing with his cars and while watching TV. Poor little man is trying to catch up from little to no nap the last couple of days. He actually took a 2 1/2 hour nap today. The most telling fact is that he didn't fight laying down for a nap. That was good because I was tired too and I slept almost as long as he did. This next week should be a more normal schedule for us.