Yesterday I had lunch at Imo’s Pizza with my friend Kurt and his son Sam, who is almost three. When Sam first sees me, he’s entirely too shy to say anything, and hides behind his dad’s legs, typical child behavior. He loosens up after a while, though, especially when I give him lots of bacon from my BLT.
I’d never been to Imo’s before and was in a BLT kind of mood. It was quite delicious, except they put approximately a pound of bacon on it, which I felt to be slightly excessive. Luckily, it was an excellent thing to give Sam, because he kept pouring salt and pepper onto the table, and then he decided to turn his milk upside-down. The bacon distracted him.
Bacon, an A+ Sam-pacifier, that’s what I learned today.
Sam got a kiddie pizza, which came with two huge goldfish-shaped cookies and some applesauce. Ben let Sam eat one of the cookies while waiting for the pizza to cool, which I thought was awfully nice of him. If I was a parent, I’d encourage eating dessert first, because what if a tornado comes up in the middle of the meal and you’d have to run for cover? No time to eat your dessert, so you might as well eat it first.
Sam didn’t want the applesauce, not AT ALL. I wondered how anybody could hate something as innocuous as applesauce, but Kurt said it’s because he’s stubborn. He said that Ben (Sam’s older brother) sometimes won’t eat food he loves because of the stubbornness.
Kurt did make a valiant attempt to convince Sam of the deliciousness of the applesauce, but Sam would have none of it. NO, he said, quite emphatically. Which was fine by us; Kurt ate the applesauce instead. He said he’s never been able to get the kids eat applesauce, even when he put blue food coloring in it. They like blue food. Because they’re children.
I said, wouldn’t it be funny if adults acted like children in regard to food? If, instead of quietly eating my BLT, I suddenly decided to be stubborn and not want the bacon, and I started flinging it on the floor? That would be some big pile of bacon, let me tell you. Or if Kurt refused to eat his perfectly good club sandwich, and instead started to cry? Or if I only wanted BLUE macaroni and cheese, which is apparently Ben’s all-time favorite? Wouldn’t it be funny if you went out to dinner with somebody, and then you had a fit because there was no blue macaroni and cheese on the menu?
At what point in a kid’s life does food stop being this big ordeal thing? I don’t remember ever not wanting any food, ever, but maybe if I asked Mom, she’d tell me I wouldn’t eat something or other. Can’t imagine it, though. It’s just funny, how you have to coax kids to eat, and it can be a big dramatic scene, but then the kid grows up and all he/she thinks about is CUTTING BACK and NOT EATING SO MUCH and LOSING WEIGHT.
Maybe we need yet another new diet, the three year-old diet. You’d only eat little bites of random things and then chuck the rest on the floor. I bet that would feel liberating, don’t you think?
The best thing about Imo’s Pizza (I’ll have to go back to try the actual Imo’s pizza) was that for some reason, a girl came around and gave us a PLATE OF FRESHLY BAKED CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES. I kid you not. Was this some kind of St. Patrick’s Day special or something? I mean, they weren’t green. They were DELICIOUS, and now I want to eat there every day. Except I’d hate to go there and be bitterly disappointed by no chocolate chip cookies, if these cookies were just some strange fluke.
Last night, I ate dinner at the Gateway to India, my favorite Springfield restaurant. I went with somebody who I haven’t been to dinner with much, and I wasn’t going to even mention Gateway to India, because it seems most people aren’t in love with Indian food like I am, but it turns out they loved it as much as me. A good time was had by all.
I also noticed that when we first got there, there were only about four other couples in the place, and I knew three out of the four. It filled up more as the evening progressed, and I was glad that there were strangers at the place, too.
Wednesday night I went to Karaoke with my friend John at the bar Breaktime. The first song he sang was “At This Moment,” which is UNBELIEVABLY sad, it seemed to me. But then he sang some cheerier things, so I didn’t have to spend the evening crying into my fuzzy navel. The drink, I mean.
Bars are too smoky, that’s all I have to say. Plus, mostly everybody there was about 20, and some people were even smoking CIGARS.
John sure does have a nice voice, though. I was disappointed that there weren’t more karaokers; there was one girl who kept singing, but mostly it was very out of tune and she seemed rather apathetic about it, like it was some horrible job and a burden, also, and she was just doing it because she had to. It was her birthday, naturally, and of course she was drunk. I guess this is a prerequisite, mostly, for doing karaoke. If I got drunk, I still wouldn’t do any karaoke.
I was expecting gobs of people up there singing, but maybe next time?
Ok then,
Grace very busy sometimes.