Things I saw at the pizza restaurant

It's our "kid weekend". Being from previous relationships, my husband and I both have our kids here every other weekend. This is one of the weekends we have them all. We ended up eating out last night. We chose a family pizza restaurant where there are usually other people with kids. I guess I just don't feel right about dragging 4 kids under the age of 10 into a "nice" restaurant where big people go to actually ENJOY a dinner as adults. However, what I saw last night disturbed me even in a child-friendly restaurant.

One family came in and apparently the parents already knew they didn't want to sit with their own kids if they wanted any chance of a peaceful dinner. So, they put their kids in a different booth and went and sat down in a booth a little ways away from their offspring. The dad had to go do damage control a few times during dinner, but I'm also sure it was a few less times than the people seated directly by those kids would have wished for.

This was one situation where Karma popped up almost instantly though. The parents had just ordered and gotten their beverages when in walked a mom and 2 kids. They sat in the booth that was back to back with the first set of parents. This woman's 4 year old immediately displayed to the whole restaurant that evolution may be logical and yes, we may have originated from monkeys. He climbed up on the table and launched himself across the back of the booth, upside down, so that his head was hanging down into the first parent's booth right about eye to eye with the mother who had managed so nicely to ditch her own monkeys. He squaked and sqeaked and thought this was a hilarious game he'd just invented. His mother did nothing, didn't even acknowledge that he was doing anything inappropriate. He finally came back fully into his own booth when the waitress brought drinks to his table. He stood on the table, squatted down into a crouch and sucked a big slurp of his pop from his glass. Again, no response from mom.

Then I looked around my own table and sure enough, there sat our 4, chewing with open mouths, crumbs all around their plates and pizza sauce dripped down the front of their shirts.