Before A. and I had the kids, we loved eating out. It was one of our favorite things to do together, and we always did it a little more often and little better than we could really afford, but it never felt like money wasted. We'd spend lazy Saturday mornings drinking bottomless cups of coffee and stuffing ourselves with omelettes at various breakfast joints, have drinks and appetizers in the middle of the afternoon in the midst of long, leisurely rambles through Boston or Cambridge. Occasionally, we'd splurge on a nice dinner at a place where the waiters are annoying ("what we've done is we've taken a filet of salmon, we've rubbed it with saffron, then dragged it through a vat of roasted, pulverized almonds, then nailed it to the wall and thrown little snails at it...") but the food is so-o-o-o good.
When the girls were teeny tiny newborns, and basically all they did was sleep, we went out a few times with them in their infant seats and ate normal meals, like normal adults. Those days, needless to say, are long gone. We've tried to go out with them a few times more recently, and I'm sorry to say that it's really not that pleasant. In fact, generally, I would not recommend dining out with twin toddlers. But if you are foolhardy enough to attempt it, you might find the following tips helpful:
1. Bring food. Forget about this notion of waiting to "order" food because it's a "restaurant." Once you get your kiddos in a highchair, and assuming it's near a mealtime, they're gonna want to eat. So bring a snack and a sippy cup to hold them over until your order arrives. Or ask the restaurant to bring you some bread, stat. No, forget that; it takes too long. Bring your own.
2. Bring toys, too. Or books, if that's what they're into. Basically anything they can hold onto before and after eating so they won't reach for the knives / Sweet and Low packets / wine glasses / your plate / etc. (Of course, they will anyway). In a pinch, spoons make pretty good toys, as do paper napkins.
3. Go at an off-peak time. Everyone will have a better time if the restaurant you go to is not crowded, so you don't feel rushed and there are fewer other customers for your children to annoy. And by off-peak, I mean really off-peak. We made the mistake of going
out this past Sunday morning to our neighborhood breakfast
hotspot at around 9:00, thinking that we'd beat the hungover college crowd, but instead, we hit the older people and
families with young kids crowd (duh). We felt stressed out the whole time. At one point Alastair looked across the table at me and said "This sucks!" A better strategy might have been tip #4.
4. Go to a mediocre restaurant. It's less likely to be crowded, and let's face it: it's not like you're going to have an exquisite gustatory experience when you're moving knives and glasses and coffee cups out of reach of your children with one hand and shoveling food into your own face with another. Also, your child will prefer whatever you're having to whatever you've ordered for them, so you won't get to eat much of it anyway. If we'd gone to the cavernous, dimly-lit breakfast place across town staffed by surly Eastern European women instead of the aforementioned breakfast hot spot, we might not have gotten fresh fruit on our plates, but we might have actually enjoyed ourselves.
5. Don't do it. Just don't. Unless you absolutely have to -- you're on vacation or something. Really, you're better off just staying home (it's cheaper, too) and make eating out a special, adults-only treat, as we did last night, to celebrate our anniversary. We got a sitter for a couple of hours and went to a great restaurant with annoying waiters and overpriced wine and not a highchair or booster seat in sight. And it. was. wonderful.
