Cooking porn

Its happened. S can open the refrigerator. Lock up your eggs, hide your catsup. Bolt down the milk, and don't even keep the yogurt in there anymore.

Yesterday, while my children ate an entire cantaloupe at one sitting, I re-marveled at what and the amount they eat. I remembered an idea I had a while ago to have a cooking with kids show. My plan was to film myself making dinner with my kids every night. I thought of it as porn for parents. My kids will often devour the raw ingredients as dinner is being made (no, I don't feed them raw meat, although they'd probably eat it). They eat uncooked pasta, molasses, whatever. Tonight, for example, H ate fist fulls of raw asparagus, and licked the onion I had just sliced, ate a lot of feta, and stuck her finger in the smoked paprika jar. (S was napping. But she actually ate the cooked version of the dinner. H was pretty full once the cooking part was done) I still think its a good idea, but I am massively uncomfortable in front of a camera, and I don't know the first thing about film or video. For now, I'll just continue to write about it.

Yes, my girls love food. And I love that they love food. They are fun to go out to dinner with.

Usually.

Last night, we all went out to dinner. It was a playing with fire dinner- we had a very busy day, full of activities that required restraint from the girls in one form or another. We had been to meeting, a children's book presentation, to the Y to sign up, and to an art opening.

We went to a bar that has good food- now that there's no smoking in bars here it makes it much easier to take your babies to bars. Not that I have always strived for this or anything- but sometimes nothing beats a dive. And if you have to drag your kids along, I'm ok with that. At the right dive. I imagine bar frequenters with out kids find this irritating, to have babies at the bar, but now that I have kids, I think we should all be tolerant. I won't give you stares for swearing in front of my kids, (although I might avoid you if you're doing jello shots) and you won't give me looks for bringing them and their entourage of stuffed animals and books and other distraction devices. Deal?

We got in, got a table. Ordered, began to relax as much as you can when dining with children. Then it happened. S decided to kick the table, and even though she is not even 2 yet, she would have knocked over the whole thing had J and I not steadied it. J had one hand on his plate of food, the other on the table, I had one hand on the table, the other grabbing S who was about to fall out of her chair. J and I both watched helplessly as J's full pint of beer teetered in slow motion before falling to the floor. Yes, we all wanted to crawl under the table, J and I to escape the situation, S and H because hey why not? Its dark and sticky down there. The whole thing went relatively unnoticed, between the bar noise and the fact that thankfully the pint glass just cracked instead of shattering. They were nice enough to not charge us for the spilt beer. Best of all was that J and I laughed instead of melting into a puddle of anxiety and shame and why do we bother going out ever anyway?

I'm not really sure why we bother going out anyway- but I'm glad we do.