Tonight, Mike and Chris were a cautionary tale, demonstrating to my longtime friend Marc (to the left, holding Chris) the commitment one must have in order to be a parent. At dinner at Chi Dynasty at the Americana at Brand, Mike was freaking out because of the two dragon statues at the entrance of the restaurant. Chris drummed a single chopstick on the table, me, the back of my seat and any other surface he could reach when he wasn’t eating. Mike, after deciding he didn’t want to eat the fortune cookies, started trying to climb the walls from a booth seat. Then Chris had a full on melt down until we let him down from his high chair, and made us drag him through the Americana — you know how they do it. They refuse to walk and hang on our arms with as much weight as possible? Yeah, like that. Then Michael, in a piece de resistance, decided to wrench himself free from my grip (or we may have been in the middle of a kid exchange, who knows) skipped into Anthropologie and into a window display. I was actually following him pretty closely, but when I urged him out of there, he nudged the flimsy partitioning between the window display and the rest of the store, knocking it all down. I actually managed to catch one part of it, and thought I had steadied it — then it fell down on top of the other partition. Sigh. I dragged Mike outside, knelt in front of him and told him in his ear that he was in very big trouble, so of course he starts bawling. He settled down just enough so I could bring him back into the store to say sorry. He didn’t actually manage to say sorry, but the two store clerks trying to right the display were nice and told him it was OK.

Yeah, I’d have second thoughts about the parenting thing if I’d had dinner with us tonight, too.

*To be fair, I should add that neither of them had good naps on Sunday — Chris for just an hour in church and Mike fell asleep for 20 minutes on the way to the Americana. Well-rested kids tend to be better behaved kids.