The other day, John and I packed up the kids for a raucous Sunday morning at Chuck E Cheez and a nice quiet lunch at an Italian restaurant. We were feeling brave and had an extra dose of parenting confidence that day.

This is rare so we decided to seize it.

Which is good, because most of the weekend we were hermits. After going through the requisite number of coins at Chuck E Cheeze, we decided it was time to move on to the fine dining portion of the day. So we went to one of those “fancy” restaurants, where they put out those big sheets of white paper on your table and the waiter or waitress comes over and writes their name for you, in case you are like me and too slow to catch it as our youngest tries to eat one of the crayons.