Yesterday was Josh’s birthday and part of the day’s festivities included a dinner out at a sit-down restaurant. We don’t often go out for food, and when we do, it’s usually something ordered and received at a counter. So the whole experience of being seated at a table, ordering from a menu and waiting isn’t something we’ve done since our younger daughter was a newborn. I don’t know what we expected, but it certainly wasn’t starting off our dinner to a fork symphony rivaling that of Beethoven’s fifth and ending up with a hand in my cup of apple juice. 

It started like anyone would expect; with the waitress seating us and our baby immediately trying to climb on the table and shove a napkin in my face while I looked through the menu. Cue the request for a highchair. 

Nowadays, all the menus are on iPads, so it doubled as a source of entertainment for our three-year-old, who immediately claimed one as her own and refused to share. 

Maybe I should have mentioned that we got to the restaurant around our usual bedtime. 

Anyways, this began the great menu debate where we proceeded to pass the one menu back and forth between Josh and me, each of us insisting that the other should look first. Eventually I asked the waitress for a third iPad so we could all have a menu. Except our baby (is she still a baby? She’s one and a half, but she’s just still so baby), who was enthusiastically banging away at the table with a fork and a knife. 

And when the waitress brought water and cups? Forget about it! The girls had a blast looking at the cups and asking for water (our three year old) and excitedly scooping out air to eat with a fork (our one year old). 

One of Josh and my biggest restaurant mistakes is that we are delusional and think our kids will actually eat their own meal. But the snacks they ate before arriving at the restaurant seemed to have served as their main dinner. So our one year old ate a few pieces of bread, a little bit of soup, and the tiniest bit of cheese pulled off the pizza we ordered. She was done eating for the rest of the meal and instead busied herself ripping up the remaining bread into pieces before storing them in her cup for safe keeping. 

Josh and I had an absolute blast, sharing every dish we ordered, the soup, the pastas, and yes, the pizza too. The portions were the perfect size for a person to finish on their own, so together we made a pretty good dent and only brought home a little bit of pizza. 

As we were trading food back and forth between the two of us, and an occasional bite from our three year old, who would comment either “I like this, this is good” or “I no like this” after licking a tiny bit, our one year old decided to climb out of the highchair. 

She’s kind of too big for it at this point, but we needed her contained so she would stop stealing her sister’s fork. Which was upsetting, because our three year old needed the fork to drop and then get upset about not having a fork. 

But the kids were occupied, and Josh and I got to enjoy a rare meal where no one was yelling and neither of us needed to get up five times for a forgotten water bottle. Here, in this cafe by the Old City skyline, the waiters fetched the forks and cleared the tables. All we needed was to be. Maybe that’s why we found the whole ordeal funny. 

Once out of the highchair, our baby made a beeline towards her favorite destination, my lap. Now usually I try not to have any children on my lap while eating, but honestly I preferred she sit on me than climb on the table, now filled with food and way too many glasses of ice. At her new location, she had a perfect vantage point of the full spread. She decided to enjoy herself by poking at my food and trying to figure out how to feed me with my own fork. 

After that, she started asking for ice, only to spit it out and drip cold water on my lap immediately. When I wasn’t handing her the ice quickly enough, she started dipping her hand into the cup of ice to fish out the cubes on her own. Maybe it’s on me for picking them out with my own fingers first. 

At this point our three year old joined in and Josh and I were cackling at the ridiculousness of the situation. The two girls with dripping hands began to argue over a spoon because our three year old insisted that the other spoon was “dirty” despite the whole situation being dirty. The one year old then placed the ice cubes on the spoon to feed herself and the three year old started to line the ice cubes up nicely on the table. The real kicker was that after the whole ordeal, our three year old drank the entire cup of dirty ice water.