It's starting to dawn on me that I might be the source of the chaos...
Tim and I made a spontaneous decision to pick the kids up from school and head right to the beer garden for an early dinner. It's a new Steven Starr restaurant in our neighborhood. Taking 3 kids to a restaurant is challenging enough, but on our way out of daycare, I saw John, a father of another 3, so I invited him to come. The kids were excited, although less so when they discovered that the only thing that grows in the garden is beer.
Just-5-Jack Peter was the oldest of the 6 kids. Toby immediately climbed onto a table with a pint of lemonade and fell onto the concrete floor on her head. I shoo-ed away the guy who came to clean it up because Toby happily played with the ice on the floor for the next 30 minutes. (brain damage?) On one of many trips to the potty, 4 kids had a 10-minute screaming contest. The guy coming out of the men's room was rattled, so imagine how I felt. I am proud that they recognized the superior accoustics of the all-concrete bathroom. Returning to our camp, the big kids showered the tables on our way with handfuls of gravel while I was minding one of the little ones.
For the first hour of our relaxing night out, 2 out of 3 of John's kids had stinky diapers. They were ignored until mom/Tanya came to join us. We used the window ledge onto the street as a changing table-musing that Steven Starr thinks of everything. (We only lost Jack Peter out the window during the entire evening which was a coup considering that 4 of them were performing on the ledge for most of the night) The first diaper change was uneventful except that the kid had on a cloth diaper that had to be saved. Saving a poopy diaper in a restaurant feels a little naughty, but hats off to them. I gave up cloth diapers after #2. The second disposable dirty diaper and soiled wipes were stowed under a bench during the re-dressing of the now-clean child. Some disaster happened...it goes without saying that the shitty diaper got stuck to Tanya's sandal as she sprinted from the "changing area" to save another kid from death. The flip-flop catapulted used wipes into the air like popcorn while she dragged the diaper along. Mercifully it stayed folded.
Tanya was reading our palms at the end of the evening telling us that we will definitely have a 4th. We spent hours there drinking beers as big as our heads. Misery loves company, and we were doing a good deed. I'm sure every one of those beer-drinking hipsters took extra precautions that night with their birth control.
