Adventures on a Thursday

I never go to the mall. I HATE malls. But RT, being a teenager in a somewhat small town, has been asking to go there to hang out with his friends. Today we agreed that he would take the bus there and that I would pick him up around 6pm. Later, I came home from an outing at the park to find a message from Nik saying that he had to work late and wouldn't be home until sometime after six. So what did I do? I came up with the idea of going to the MALL to have dinner with the kids. You know, one of those chain restaurants where everything kind of tastes the same. My reasoning was this: 1) I did not feel like cooking anything for dinner, especially if it was just going to be the three of us and 2) I want Oliver and Sami to get used to eating in restaurants. We hardly ever eat out -- maybe only three or four times a year; and 3) last time we picked RT up at the mall, both kids were very interested in this particular restaurant and it's colorful chandeliers. So off we went.

Oliver was so excited to be sitting in our bouncy green booth with the fancy chandelier that he could barely sit still. I ordered both the kids a juice box and a lemonade for myself and you would have thought they had never had a drink of anything in their life. In fact, Oliver often insisted on drinking from his juice box and my lemonade at the same time. And did I mention how excited he was? He kept letting out these loud sort of whooping noises. I don't think anything of them anymore but we did get some kind of nervous looks from some of the wait staff. But I really don't care. Especially now that we will never be going back there again.

Shortly after we ordered our food Sami announced that he had to go to the bathroom. He is enthralled with public bathrooms so I regarded him a bit skeptically but gathered them both up and herded them towards the women's room. Sami spent some time using the potty and I hurried him along thinking that I didn't want to spend the entire time in the toilet. When we got back to the table both kids were so excited that they barely ate anything. Oliver kept trying to stand up and swing the chandelier back and forth and Sami just wanted to talk about the decorations on the wall. My food tasted like cardboard. It was about this time that I started to regret the whole adventure.

Then Sami told me that he had to go to the potty again and I told him that we were almost finished and he would have to wait. Huge, fatal mistake. A minute later he got kind of an astonished look on his face and he told me that he had poop in his pants. I got up to get a better look and saw that there was, in fact, poop -- everywhere. I started grabbing napkins from all the nearby tables but it barely helped. The waitress brought me some towels but what we really needed was a hose. Oliver took advantage of my distraction to start banging wildly on the chandelier and in the process accidentally knocked over my lemonade. I cleaned up and bagged up as much as I could, threw some money down and made a bee line for the door.

Lest you think it was all bad, though, a couple of good things:

1. I'm ready to try again. Different restaurant though.
2. Oliver loves going places and trying new things. He was so full of joy, sitting there in that booth.
3. Sami was a real sport through it all.
4. I was actually able to laugh and see the humor in it.
5. I am now re-thinking that cow-share that I was going to buy since I'm pretty sure it was all that yummy milk that threw his system out of whack.