Friday no dinner

Last night I was going to make the dinner I'd been planning for Thursday, but it will have to wait another day because we ended up going out. This is why I don't do serious meal-planning: I like to be flexible. At least, that's my excuse. Hope springs eternal would be another way of putting it.

One of B's officemates had his doctoral defense yesterday (this is the point where, after years of study and hard work and going out drinking, and months and months of thesis-writing and staying in drinking and eventual last-minute submission, you finally "defend" the thesis by presenting its contents to your committee and any interested parties who feel like attending, and answer their questions, and after some deliberation they come out and tell you, "Congratulations, Doctor X!" and you fall over with relief and immediately head out to get as drunk as possible*) and he and his family and a few people from work were going out to dinner. As his family contains a six-year-old girl and they were going to an Indian restaurant, I let my laziness and love of dal get the better of my common sense and decided we should go. It was a 5.30 reservation; surely the kids would survive. They might even eat some naan.

But no. I am an idiot. A perennially optimistic idiot who lets herself be swayed by her stomach in the face of incontrovertible evidence. "I don't want to go!" said Monkey. "He's just hungry," I told myself. "I'll make you a sandwich. You can eat it in the car and you'll be fine by the time we get there." I gave Mabel an english muffin and an apple (or parts thereof) so that she wouldn't starve even if she didn't like the food. I put on a different, dressier in some indefineable way, pair of jeans and a tiny smidge of eyeshadow and some minutely dangly earrings. I was Going Out, and I didn't care.

We didn't get there till 6.00, thanks to a crash or three on the Beltway and our usual inability to be punctual. (This used to upset me. I hate being late. But two children and one husband who apparently thinks time will move backwards once he gets in the car have worn me down and if it's not my outing, I don't worry about it.)

What I completely failed to take into account was that just because they are quite capable of being wide awake in our own home until well past 8pm, I should not assume that this means they are able to be reasonable human beings who can sit still in a public place surrounded by strangers at any point in the day past, ooh, 10am.

The promised six-year-old girl was doing a lovely job showing up my horrible children, by sitting decorously beside her father, trying new foods, and conversing with me. (We do know them. I wasn't a total stranger.) Meanwhile, my almost-five-year-old boy spent the first 20 minutes trying to pull my arm out of my socket as he refused to sit at the far end of a long table that also had other people at it. I don't even know what the two-year-old was doing. Being cute and not shy, yes; sitting quietly, no. We had to take turns promenading her outside for a run up and down, because she just couldn't be calm. (I know. You're thinking: she's a two-year-old and it's getting on for bedtime. What did you expect? I don't know.)

After I little while I realised that Monkey couldn't sit down because he was dying for the loo: I scooped him up and headed for the Ladies, where I chased him round the small room a few times and finally achieved the desired effect. That calmed him down an iota, and all three children spent a little while happily under the table, until things got too raucous and the food started to arrive.

As I bolted a delicious samosa and hastily spooned basmati and various delectable accompaniments onto my plate, I reflected disappointedly on my totally uncivilised, unsocialized, basically feral children. We're stuck in a vicous circle of never being able to go anywhere nice because they are never taken anywhere nice so they don't know how to behave when they get there. I gave Monkey a few quick pointers on how the other people wanted a nice quiet dinner and not to see him gyrating all over his chair, but he wasn't really in a receptive place, and Mabel was beyond redemption. Besides, she's two.

Thinking back, we would never have attempted to do this when Monkey was two. Or if we had, our expectations would have been much lower. I don't know why we should expect it to go better now that there are two of them: it's not as if he will raise her to five-year-old standards (such as they are); rather, they will both sink to the lowest common denominator, which in this case is tired-two-year-old behaviour.

We ate, we negotiated payment, we took away our horrible offspring and drove home. I just then realised that it was already 7.15 and on a normal night they'd be deep in toothbrushing or stories at this point. And even toothbrushing never goes smoothly.

So that's why there are no pictures of Friday night's dinner. But it was delicious, and I didn't have to cook it, and despite all the distractions I did appreciate that. We may even dine out again, some day, in about three years' time.


* Not necessarily you. Certainly not me. Other people, I mean. I definitely don't have a PhD. I would have been up for most of the drinking, back in the day, but not all that concomitant work.