Sign of the times

We just got back from having fast food for our New Year's Eve dinner. As you can probably guess, that wasn't the original plan.

A couple of our friends invited us to meet them at a steakhouse, and we were excited. We hadn't had a chance to hang out with them in quite a while. Plus, they have a son who's only 3 months younger than Biscuit.

Jeff and I used the call-ahead seating option, thinking it would make things easier with the boys, as 2-year-olds aren't known for their patience.

We got to the restaurant, and our friends were already there. They didn't know we had called ahead, so they had put their name on the wait list. We met at 5 p.m., thinking that should ensure us a quick wait before being able to eat (or more accurately, a quick wait before we could feed our boys).

Our friends were told there was a 30-minute wait. And Jeff and I found out the call-ahead seating was baloney. All they did was move our name from the call-ahead list to the bottom of the wait list.

At 6 p.m., we were still waiting, and the hostesses were still telling people it would be 30 minutes as they walked in the door. One of our boys was on the verge of a meltdown, and the other was starting to whine about being hungry.

Our friend made a joke about just going to a fast food place, and the more I thought about it, the better the idea sounded. Even if they had called our name next to take us to our table, we would still have had to wait for our server, then wait for our drinks, then wait for our food. And for toddlers, waiting for an hour to get to the table is bad enough, much less all the other stuff.

So we had some fast food and let the boys play, the adults were able to talk, and we had plenty of room to spread out. We were all getting pretty stressed out at the steakhouse, so I think the fast food place just allowed us to be more relaxed and at ease.

It wasn't exactly what we had planned for our New Year's Eve, but anyone who's had a toddler knows that 2-year-olds are unpredictable, and until they're not toddlers anymore, our lives will be unpredictable, too.