Friday, June 02, 2006

Pickles, Band-Aid's & Crayons

We took the kids out for dinner last night to Friendly's. (For those of you unacquainted with Friendly's, it is basically a slightly more upscale, "sit-down" version of McDonald's - with better ice cream.)

Andrew "ordered" the hotdog while Katie preferred the grilled cheese. Andrew calmly extracted the hotdog from the bun and devoured only the meat. Note: this is standard procedure for my kids - they don't understand hotdog buns yet. This was made evident by the fact that when we next noticed Andrew he was gleefully dipping the bun into the ketchup mound on his plate (intended for the fries) and then eating it.

Katie, on the other hand, daintily ate her sandwich, being very careful not to ingest any of the dreaded crust. She then ate all of her pickles. It is funny to watch the difference between Andrew's and Katie's eating styles. Andrew stuffed as many pickle slices into his mouth as possible. Katie ate each slice in two bites - I may have imagined it, but I think she even had her "pinkie extended."

All day yesterday, Katie had been trying to convince me to put a Band-Aid on her finger. She insisted that there was an "owee" on it. I spent all day trying to convince Katie that since there was no blood in sight, a Band-Aid was not needed. (She has gone through almost an entire box of Band-Aids since the beginning of May.) At the restaurant last night, she remembered her hurt finger and soberly, with much theatrics, wrapped her entire hand in a napkin. Apparently doctors have underrated the healing powers of napkins, because about five minutes later, she pronounced the wound "all better" and removed the napkin. Amazing breakthrough in medical technology!

Andrew, meanwhile, was engrossed in the crayons (or "cray-rons" as he calls them) that restaurants such as this give out with the kids' menus/worksheets/scribble sheets. He discovered that if he took the straw out of his plastic cup, the crayons would fit into the hole in the lid. So the blue and green crayons took a swim in the dregs of his apple juice. At some point, he fished the crayons out of the cup, because we noticed that he was a bit disgusted at the soggy wrappers and solemnly stripped them off the crayons.

By the time we left the restaurant, both children needed to be washed - Andrew would have benefited from a pressure wash.