Eating out

When you have a child, summer is a special flavour of madness.

There are six weeks between the end of the school year and the start of the next, so it's kind of enforced family holiday time. Even if you don't take a holiday, most of your child's friends will disappear. The side effect of this is that not only do you have to figure where the child can physically be for those extra 6½ hours per weekday, but they need activities as well, or they go crazy. So the lack of the normal playmates just means the entire time is spent following one long map from event to event to event.

A lot of those events for us ended up eating out.

Between my parents visiting for R's birthday, R and L meeting me for my lunchhour at work. Meeting up with visiting friends, and our actual holiday, we found ourselves going to restaurants more often than we had for a some time.

Eating out with a child is risky.

A continual problem is that she doesn't understand that what she asked for when she orders is what she's stuck with for the rest of the meal. We try to mitigate things by ordering for ourselves things she might like. So if R doesn't like what she gets, L or I can share parts of what we get with her.

Best case, she ends up with something she likes and eats all of it.

Next best case, she eats until she's full, then L and I eat the remains. It helps in restaurants with small portions which don't fill up an adult.

The worst case, she refuses to eat anything. Not her meal. Not L's meal. Not my meal. And, of course, when we get home she asks I'm hungry. What's for dinner?

We had dinner. It was at the restaurant. That was it. We told you it was dinner and to eat at the time. It's bedtime now. You can eat in the morning.

It usually ends up with her delaying bedtime for uncomfortably long while eating some hastily prepared rice cake and something sandwich. It's not like we have loads of snacks and easy to prepare foods around the house. Because they are snacks and easy to prepare — they just disappear.

It doesn't end with just food choices. You never know when you make meal plans if the child is going to be in a mood or not. Or, if there are other kids, if one of them moods out, then that will just be contagious, and it's all grumps and I wants.

On the other hand, R does know how to handle herself in a restaurant, even if she forgets sometimes.

Dinner is always when a child is most tired and fragile. No wonder so many parents end up doing dinner at 5pm. It avoids the daily meltdowns. And also avoids family dinners with friends as well. Not at all ideal.

R and I used to play café when she was around 2 and 3. We'd sit on the sofa and pretend to order food from a menu, talk to the waitstaff, eat, and so on. It was fun, and it means she knows how a meal in a restaurant is supposed to go, even if she often gets distracted and forgets. However, when she gets in the moment, she is on it. If she's thirsty she'll hail a waiter and order a sparkling water. If there's no waiter in sight, she'll just walk up to the bar and order.

You'd be surprised how few bars will even talk to six year who is queuing with the rest of the adults

Often, at the end of the meal, when we start talking about getting the bill, she'll just get up and go up to a waiter and ask Can we get the bill please?

So while eating and interacting with us in a restaurant may be a challenge for her, dealing with the staff she seems to have mastered.