We had a particularly successful dining out experience with our children tonight. The way that I know it was successful is that I had to chase my toddler into the men’s room, I ended up with Sprite all over my shirt, and the people around us spent a lot of time looking at us, which are all clear signals you are winning at appropriate social behaviors. It made me once again question why we ever attempt to take our children out to eat in public. And of course, the obvious answer to that question is that I deeply enjoy watching my children complain about someone else’s cooking instead of mine. (This is particularly satisfying when I consider that they got to pick their own food from a menu and customize it to their exact taste and then spend half an hour complaining how it’s not what they want. Sometimes I feel the urge to invite the cook out to listen to their detailed complaints so I giggle gleefully under the table. My husband doesn’t seem to think this is polite behavior though. Party pooper.)

We have been terrorizing various fine dining establishments with our crew for over a decade now, so we’re pretty good at it. If you, too, want to be awesome at eating out with kids, there are a few rules you’re going to need to follow.

1. Always evaluate the fanciness quotient of the restaurant before unleashing your circus on the premises. There’s a very complicated algorithm involving cost, wait time, fragility of decor, appearance of chicken nuggets on the menu, and whether or not there is a self pay tablet your children can rack up charges playing trivia games on. But if that gets to be too much for you, the basic rule of thumb is this: if it’s a place you would go escape your own children, think twice before letting the other patrons share the joy of your children’s company. This usually works well for us, although some people have differing standards for date night. If you like paying a babysitter minimum wage to leave your children and go celebrate your anniversary at McDonald’s, I’m going to go ahead and let my one year old crawl under your legs to get the fries you might accidentally drop under your table and sleep fine that night to boot (unless my one year old then spends the night puking, which is not impossible if they’re eating fries off the floor at McDonald’s, but instead of feeling guilty at 1 AM putting puked-on pillow cases in the wash I’m going to be judging your life choices and wondering if you maybe got engaged at McDonald’s, or maybe you met working there, or maybe your last name is McDonald? I mean, the egg McMuffins are pretty good but is there not an Olive Garden near your home?)
2. Always make sure at least one of your kids is potty training before contemplating a night on the town, and go ahead and forgo the pull-up for underwear because this is a special occasion and restaurant bathrooms feel so fancy to a toddler so they’ll want to spend a lot of time in there. Congratulate yourself on this foolproof plan and know that nothing can go wrong.
3. If you only have one kid, you’ll want to go ahead and pop out a few more before you consider eating out with them, because a night where you don’t have to endure a loud prolonged argument about where to eat is boring. Ideally you will have cultivated their tastes at home so they all enjoy a different, highly specific type of cuisine and absolutely abhor anything else to the point of anxiety and tears when they contemplate being asked to eat a slice of pizza or anything with beans.
4. Bring your own 160 count box of crayons to the restaurant to avoid fighting when they all need the exact same blue at the exact same time because the restaurant foolishly provided them all with the exact same menu with the exact same picture of a massive blueberry. To really make this have the best outcome you should make sure that giant box of crayons gets spilled at least three times throughout the meal, preferably before you spill a couple of glasses of soda so the crayons can achieve optimal sogginess before you try to clean them up. (And let’s not pretend you didn’t know that you were going to spill multiple glasses of soda before the night was over. This was non-negotiable from the start. That’s why you didn’t make them change into clean shirts before you left the house, you smarty-pants you. It was totally not because you were just too lazy to fight that battle.)
5. Experts agree that you should teach your children to order on their own to foster independence and confidence. We also like to teach our children to grill the waitress on whether they can substitute a bowl of steak for their broccoli and whether they can make that hamburger with quadruple the pickles and ice cream in lieu of mustard because we want to raise kids that know the world is their oyster and they shouldn’t take no for an answer. Also because we are hoping someday they will go viral when someone catches their ordering performance on camera and posts it to Youtube, which will lead to fame and fortune for us, or at least the opportunity to hit up a few morning news shows to defend our parenting to the world and promote our t-shirts.

If this set of guidelines doesn’t have you running from the restaurant mid-meal with your kids crying, sleeping, and/or covered in bodily fluids and unidentified condiments, then I really can’t help you in your quest for unforgettable dining adventures. Enjoy your drive home knowing you are truly a parental wonder. If you can hear yourself over the sound of your kids demanding you stop somewhere and get them a hamburger and maybe an ice cream cone because they are STARVING.