Owen and the Ethiopian Restaurant

Owen and I went out to dinner at an nearby Ethiopian restaurant tonight. Here's a tip for going to a restaurant with your toddler son: make sure the waitstaff knows you're not waiting for anyone else. We got there and told the hostess person that we were the only people in our party and we seated. Then a waitress came and gave us two glasses of water and two menus. I suppose I should have realized when she gave us two menus that she thought someone else was coming, but, well, I didn't put it together. I asked her if there was any way we could turn on the ceiling fans (Owen and I were the only people in that part of the restaurant and, while it is clearly wintertime here and was kind of cold in the restaurant, Owen really likes ceiling fans), she looked at me skeptically and went away (I was not confident that she speaks English well - this was probably not an anticipated conversation).

Twenty-five minutes and a call from a colleague about a case at work later, she came back to see if I wanted a drink while we waited for the third person. She was really apologetic when we got it cleared up, but it was still kind of a pain. Twenty-five minutes with a restless toddler in a restaurant while you're trying to talk on a cell phone that your toddler is trying to grab, without giving away any client confidences, while trying to think through a kind of tricky legal issue, is not like, say, spending twenty-five minutes at the spa.

Owen seemed to like the ice cubes in the ice water best, but he was willing to eat a lot of bread and a few carrots. It was a nice time.