Don’t.
As you probably know if you have ever been a parent, dining out at nice restaurants is one of the first thing that gets crossed off your list of stuff you like doing.
Before kids, restaurants = fun date night, nice atmosphere, good time
After kids, restaurants= shushing someone every 3 seconds, not eating your own food because you are busy cutting other people’s for them and helping them use the big fork, 5 trips to the potty before the bread even comes, spilled drinks, a larger bill, and mostly just a headache that’s not even worth it.
Yeah, we don’t go out to “sit-down and be waited upon” restaurants very often. It’s mostly pizza buffets or Panera Bread around here when we go out for dinner.
What we do like to do on days like today when, after we had a lot of fun picking cherries, I came home to discover that the dog had gotten into the bathroom trash, strewn it about the house and then thrown up in the kitchen and gotten sick myself from cleaning all that up (cuz when you are preggers that kind of thing does not sit well) then have one child who refuses to nap and and one with three dirty diapers within 10 minutes, is order restaurant take out.
This is not a novel idea, but I do have some tips/reasons it is much better to do this for a young family.
- Adults can order from the kids menu when you order take-out, usually as long as there is one “main” meal ordered.
- If you order yourself something from the kids menu it usually only costs about $5 and comes with a drink.
- Otherwise, you save a lot of money by using the drinks you already have at home
- You don’t have to tip as much (although we always do tip the take out people)
- You aren’t bothering anyone else in the restaurant if the kids have an off day
- Um…you don’t have to cook. (duh)
- Cheat the kids (whatever, they’re to little to know the difference.) When we get Olive Garden I usually give them Chef Boyardee from our pantry and share some of my salad with them.
Tonight we ordered from Olive Garden & hubby & I will be splitting a Tour of Italy (which comes with fettuccine, chicken parmesan, lasagna, bread sticks, and a large salad for less than $16) . It is waaaaay cheaper and less stressful to order take-out this way if you want a nice restaurant-style dinner than it is to do the whole sit-down scene if you have a family. It actually costs about the same for us to order from Olive Garden for the family as it does to get a pizza delivered from Papa John’s and I like that the Olive Garden option comes with a salad. If you’re single, it’s pretty much a wash except for the whole drink/tip thing, which is negligible. Plus, if you’re single, I say live it up while you can! 🙂
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