A few weeks ago we decided to eat dinner at our favorite neighborhood Italian restaurant with Adam & Tabitha in tow.   The restaurant is popular so, to get a table for four in under an hour we arrived with the 5 o’clock dinner crowd, made up mostly of retirees.   As the hostess led us to our table - Adam and Tabitha, despite their parent’s coaching to the contrary, obliviously barrelled past people with walkers and spoke in their “outside voices”. 

Watching my children bounce by, about half the oldies smiled sweetly; the other half rolled their eyes in disgust.  I’ve found that overt disgust at my family’s invasion of any quiet restaurant is typical New Jersey old person behavior, so I tend to brush it off knowing that, at 36 I’m already pretty crotchety, and without their good excuse of a lifetime spent living in the punchline to every petrochemical waste joke. 

Seated at our table at the back of the restaurant (no accident, I’m sure) we were around the corner from a door that the busboys use to move waste to the back alley.  At some point during the day, two or three small moths must have found their way through the open door and into the restaurant.  The moths loitered around the light cast up by the nearby wall sconce - their frantic flapping wings begging for a child’s attention.  

Adam didn’t disappoint.  In our favorite restaurant, nearly silent except for the sounds of dentures biting into al dente pasta, our boy yelled at the top of his voice, “Wow! Mommy, daddy, look at the big bugs all over this place!  Eeeew. Gross!”  

Ahhh…children. 

You wait so long to hear them speak their first word.  You wait for months, or even years to carry on a simple conversation with them.  Then, one day, just as you begin to see their little personality emerge through their speech…

…they single-handedly summon the Health Department to your favorite dining establishment over a few errant moths.  

Thanks for making all the waiting worthwhile, kiddos!

As for dining out that evening, Adam’s observation elicited angry stares from the village elders (and I suspect lit torches were in the ready), so we beat a hasty retreat to the mini-van, our meals in to-go containers.  I think take-out is still probably the way to go - at least for the next five or ten years.