That universal question....

Why can't it be easy? We have an appointment this afternoon to get our taxes done. We are taking the kids to my mom's house in Hastings for her to babysit them during our appointment. We thought it would be nice to take the kids and go out to lunch before we head to mom's. This brings us to that universal, quintessential question....

Where do you want to go eat?

Those words bring goosebumps to my skin and a chill to my heart. Where do I want to go eat? Sounds like a simple enough question. But here's the problem...where I would like to go eat is never a place that my kids can go eat. I like restaurants that have nothing on their menu that comes in "nugget" form. I like restaurants with real plates and silverware. I like restaurants with ambiance and a little style (and by style, I do not mean a mural of clowns painted on the wall). How about a wine list? Perhaps a chef in the kitchen? Unfortunately....these are not places I can take my kids. What about pizza, you ask? Sounds good in theory...gourmet toppings for the moms? Plain cheese pizza for the kids? Nope. How quickly you forget....my kids are odd. There is not a single one of my three children who will eat pizza. Weird, but true. To have a halfway pleasant eating experience with my children, a restaurant has to 1.) have either grilled cheese or hot dogs on their menu, 2.) be loud enough to drown out the roar that my children make in public, and 3.) have kids' menus that come with crayons...to entertain destructive hands. This definitely limits the variety and novelty of the restaurants we can go to. We end up frequenting the same handful of restaurants over and over and over again.

So...we consider our options carefully...we debate...we exhaust our brain capacity trying to think of that "new" and "exciting" restaurant that is also....ugh.....kid-friendly. Where do you want to go? I don't know. Where do you want to go? I don't know. Round and round and round. In the end...we will end up at one of a couple of frequently-visited restaurants. We will spend too much money for food that our kids will not eat. We may as well wad up a handful of fives and throw them out the car window. And our food will be bland and tasteless. Why do we ever think that taking the kids out to eat is a good idea? Are we insane? I guess so because we keep doing it over and over again. You would think we would have learned our lesson by now. Apparently, we are slow.