Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) (16 page)

BOOK: Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)

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We’ve also tried getting them involved in cooking—something they both love. François excitedly signed up for a cooking elective after school and proudly brought home his creations—salad, a hamburger, pesto sauce, etc. In 10 weeks, the only one he ate was Monkey Bread. He’s been asking to take the course again, promising that “this time I’ll eat everything.” Nowadays Johan repeatedly comes into the kitchen shouting, “I want to make a concoction!”

François and Johan Licking the Bowl

Concoction
by Johan van Kempen

Step 1: Retrieve big green bowl from cupboard and tap Mommy on the back with it She’ll get the idea

Step 2: With help, assemble ingredients and measur ing implements Beg for eggs and ask Mommy whether any accidentally broke in the fridge and can be used for playtime

Step 3: Add
c. flour,
c. sugar, 1 tsp salt, 1 or 2, maybe tsps paprika (for the color) to bowl Whisk violently—making sure to spill a little out of the top

Step 4: Add something wet Water will work but make sure you ask Mommy for milk or melt ed butter Depending on what she’s doing she might say yes

Step 5: Mix Mix some more Maybe a little more Taste Make a face and growl at the bowl menacingly Taste again Growling didn’t make it taste any better

Step 6: Ask Mommy for chocolate chips If she gives you any make sure to pull a couple out of the bowl to eat them

Step 7: Pour the whole mess into a“Johan pan (a par ticularly beloved cookie sheet) and put into the extra oven we only use once or twice a week

Step 8: Laugh when Mommy remembers it’s there usually several days later

Despite the struggles with picky eating, we always try to make family meals a time to eat and enjoy each other. Lately we always play I-Spy at the table, and François is really good at it. He’ll stump us occasionally and often guess our obscure choices. Johan, however, keeps us guessing. He hasn’t quite mastered yet that the thing he spies actually has to be in the room, so he’ll say he spies something blue. After we’ve gone through everything blue within sight, he’ll happily crow, “It’s a blue whale, you lose!” For the record, there are no whales in our house or in Brooklyn that I know of. At least not real ones. We make sure that at the dinner table, napkins are in laps, cutlery is used and conversations are initiated. Some families we know draw topics out of a hat, but that seems a little forced to me. We’re not quite at the point where we can require each child to bring a current event to discuss, but at least we can ask each boy what they did at school or the playground and play games.

When it comes to dining out, we like to chain our children to the table. One leg each, so it doesn’t show. We lived through lots of teasing, admonition and holier-than-thou preaching after a particular episode of
Housewives
aired, one that showed François stabbing a kangaroo into the hamburger of a cast member at a dinner he should never have attended in a fancy restaurant that ran very late. Misbehavior to that extent really is rare for our kids, but it happens when the perfect storm of parental distraction, overtired children and too many people come together. Do take your children to good restaurants, just not at 10 p.m., so that they develop an appreciation for good food and grow up respecting dining establishments. If you only take your child to McDonalds or IHOP, they will grow up thinking that it’s OK to run like a mad-man through restaurants, and that plastic, overprocessed food full of chemicals is acceptable. Particularly if given a chance to blow off steam before and after, children absolutely can learn to behave themselves in restaurants. Similar to our flight to Australia, I have to laugh when I see posts online of “sightings” of our family in restaurants. The discussion goes something like this:

[email protected]:
Saw Alex and Simon from RHONY last night. They seemed really low key and normal and their kids were very well behaved!

[email protected]
: No hamburgers were killed? Amazing.

[email protected]:
LOL, I know!

In urban areas diners are spoiled for choice. In our neighborhood alone there are 50-some establishments, most of which welcome or at least tolerate children. We learned a lot through experience, not the least of which is that in urban settings with so much competition, there are many great restaurants that welcome well-behaved children and manage to leave the adults with a feeling they’ve had a good meal without sacrificing themselves to big-box corporate chains or uninspiring food for the sakes of their offspring.

Our best bets are restaurants with plenty of things to see while waiting, such as fiery brick ovens, open kitchens where you can see the staff working, places with live music (Sunday brunches with bands are normally a hit) as well as almost any place with outdoor seating in good weather. Our neighborhood has a number of old-school French and Italian restaurants with gardens, most of which have pétanque or bocce courts where kids can stroll around between courses or even play a game with the old-timers.

We always bring distractions, such as a bag of books, small toys that are not small enough to get lost in someone’s food, flash cards or coloring books. The flash cards with simple math are great, and sometimes even more entertaining than they are meant to be. We have a math deck with pictures of animals on it and recently Johan solemnly held up a card and said, “5 + 9 = Pigs.” There were, in fact, pigs on the card, but not 14 of them. Another phase passed through involved drawing contests—the boys each draw as many pictures as they can before the food comes. Make quiet puppet theatre with forks if the restaurant is noisy. The bathroom can also be a fun place to visit when you’re a little kid, particularly for the newly potty trained. In fact sometimes when we’re out at a neighborhood restaurant where we know all the staff and most of the customers, we take a table close enough that they can walk in themselves. This works well in familiar restaurants where we’ve been to the bathroom many times and only one person goes in at a time.

The biggest recipe for disaster with dining out is parental distraction. Like clockwork, every time Simon or I have had our attention pulled away from the kids at a meal in a restaurant, the boys get restless. It’s as though they have an unspoken signal between the two of them, “Mom and Dad aren’t looking. Quick! Into the kitchen to tackle the chef!” Ergo, we’ve learned the hard way to pay attention at all times. If someone’s phone rings or someone comes up to the table to say hello, at least one of us concentrates on keeping the troops in their chairs.

TOP 10 THINGS WE DON
T LIKE ABOUT CHILDREN
S RESTAURANTS:

10. The food is awful.
9. Unruly behavior in children is tolerated more than in “grown-up” restaurants. Do you really want to be bitten in the leg by someone else’s kid? Have they had a rabies shot?
8. Parents get annoyed by and and don’t watch their children closely Those kids spin out of control and tempt your kids into misbehaving
7. Mayhem ensues.
6. You lose your child. François convinced us to have a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese
and when the dancing mouse came out to put on the happy birthday show
we couldn
t find him as he
d disappeared into the crawling maze.
5. Our kids won
t eat any of the cutesy items on the menu anyway.
4. I
d rather talk to my kids about the interesting paintings on the wall instead of whatever Cartoon Network is playing above their heads
3. Servers for some reason tend pay more attention to kids when they’re the only ones in a restaurant as opposed to one of a hundred
2. Adult restaurants have a better wine selection.
1. Where would you rather be? A bistro devoted to race car driving with s toy cars on the walls or T.G I.Friday’s?