Reason 467 that kids are soooo much fun

We went out for dinner after a school function last night. We decided to take the family to Outback. Not neccesarily a high-end restaurant, but with a family of 5 and my mom to boot, we expected to blow at least a hundred buckeroonies.

Let me just tell you, eating out with preschoolers is not always fun.

I'll give it to my kids, we were walking in the door at Outback around the same time they normally go to bed. Any parent of a preschooler knows that once they hit the point where they should have been in bed, one of two things will happen: they will get cranky, or they will get hyper. My kids tend to get hyper. While the hostess was finding a table big enough to hold my crew, the spawns of satan that I gave birth to started tearing apart the waiting area. I was in the bathroom "freshening up" while we were waiting, and when I came back, Abby was running laps on the bench in the waiting area, and Molly had emptied an entire bookshelf of kids books and had started on a tub of blocks. By the time I got that cleaned up and finished shooting some daggers at my husband (love you, honey), our table was ready.

One table over from us was a family who lives in our neighborhood. They have two sons, who are around 5 and 7. As soon as the boys saw us, they started yelling Molly's name. Molly is a sociable kind of girl. She's also a flirt. The next ten minutes were spent watching the two boys competing for the attention of my three year old which made my husband pull out his Papa Bear card and remind our little girl that boys are icky. He's hoping she'll wind up more interested in watching softball than baseball, if you know what I mean. We diverted Molly's attention with two words guaranteed to get the attention of any child: chocolate milk.

I asked the kids what they wanted to eat. Bryan, being a sulky almost-fourteen year old, declared that there was nothing on the menu worth eating. Seriously, kid? STEAK. Helllooooo?!? The girls knew what they wanted, and after 2.4 seconds, so did the rest of the people in the building.

"Chickens, chickens, I wants chickens, Mommy, chickens!"

"Macardoni and cheese! Mommy, mommy, mommy, mom, mom, mom, hey ma, hey ma, can I have macardoni and cheese?"

It had been a long day. I'd have fed them chocolate bon-bons for dinner if they'd be quiet, seriously. We ordered. They colored for a minute, then decided to make the crayons naked. Yeah, that's what they call it when they strip the paper off the crayons. Honestly, I'd rather see them undress the crayons than eat the crayons, so whatever. I was not, however, pleased when Abby started singing her naked crayon song.

"Nekkie, nekkie, crayons are nekkie, nekkie, NAKED!"

We got our food in record time (can't imagine why), and the kids decided at that instant that they were no longer hungry. Of course they did. If they ate at dinner, what would they use as an excuse not to go to bed when we got home? I gave them some more crayons to undress and dug into my steak.

Let me take a break in my horror story to tell you about my steak. Outback has a filet mignon that they put this horseradish crust on top of. It is slap-yo-mamma good. I'm serious. Try it.

I ate about four bites of my steak when the real fun began. Abby stood up in her highchair. I hissed "Sit down now," in my most serious mom voice.

"I can't. My booty hurts."

Abby is going through this weird phase where everything she says comes out in an outside kind of voice. She's loud. She's also cute, so people pay attention to her when she yells things. Heads turned toward our table. I asked what was wrong with her booty.

"I have to POOP!"

Oh, dear God, please let that have gone unnoticed. A quick glance around the room told me that it was definitely noticed. In addition to being loud, Abby also repeats herself a lot.

"I have to poop! I have to poop! Mommy, I have to poooooopy!"

I'm trying hard to potty train her, which is not so much fun. She has no interest in using the potty at home, but she feels the need to sit on every public toilet we get within a one mile radius of. Of course, I took her. Of course, Molly had to go, too.

Forty minutes later (I swear, I timed it), we returned to the table. There was an elderly man getting up to leave at the table next to ours. He leaned over to Abby and said, "Well, little lady, did you do your potty duty?" It might have been creepy, but he was like 110 and adorable, and he said it with a smile, so it wasn't icky at all. Abby smiled her brightest smile and answered him with a yell.

"No, I no pooped in the potty. I poop in mine pants!"

If you don't have kids and decide one day to take that turn toward masochism, remember this piece of advice. Do not EVER take them out to eat. Ever. Trust me on this one.

My screws are loose, and it's all my husband's fault.

My husband is one of those people that was blessed with an inclination for mechanical things. He can pop the hood of a car, poke around for a minute, and tell you what's been making that chunka-chunka-grind noise every time you swerve to avoid a squirrel. He's good like that.

It seems that Molly was also born with this natural desire to know how things work. Since she was very small, she's had a tendency to take things apart. She learned to pull herself up from the floor by gripping the front of daddy's toolbox. She's one of those kids that you can't leave alone in a room, not even for a moment. She'll disassemble the vacuum cleaner in the time it takes you to race to the bathroom and pee.

We keep a baby gate at the top of our staircase because of a few incidents that I like to refer to as "roly-poly baby tumblings." A few nights ago, Molly found a screwdriver in the kitchen and took the gate apart. I flipped out - that gate is crucial for preventing ER visits! In the midst of my panic, her father celebrated. His little baby girl had advanced to a whole new level of destruction.

The next day he made her a toolbox of her very own, complete with a message of love to his new little mechanic buddy scrawled in Sharpie across the top. That was two very long days ago. In the time since she was gifted with her tools of destruction, she has taken apart the same baby gate again, removed some very important screws from a glider rocking chair, unhinged two cabinet doors and taken off an outlet cover. I also have a small pile of screws of unknown origin.

There is an important lesson to be learned here: Never give a three year old a screwdriver. More importantly, never allow your husband to give your children unapproved gifts. EVER. Oh, and don't slip with the screwdriver when you're replacing an outlet cover.