Blog Number 242

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Monday was my daughter's 6th birthday.  As I have mentioned before, our tradition is to have the birthday person pick a restaurant for their birthday dinner.  Once there, the birthday person gets the only menu and they get to order the entire meal for the family.  There are no rules however if you make a poor (or cruel) choice for someone you have to keep in mind that their birthday will come around eventually and payback will be allowed.  Anyway, the daughter picked Macaroni Grill (she has expensive tastes).  I had never been there before but the wife and daughter have and the birthday girl had her heart set on some fettuccini.  For those of you who have not been to this restaurant chain, they have butcher paper on the tables and give you ample crayons to draw and color while you wait for service / food.  I have to admit that I had too much fun with this and colored more than both kids put together.  When it came time to order our 6 year old did a great job.  She is typically quiet and the place was a little noisy so she had to speak up above her normal volume.  She ordered her fettuccini and a pizza for her brother (solidifying a good meal in July when he turns 10).  The menu had a thing called a Mama's Trio so she ordered that for the wife (logically since it said Mama right there on the menu!).  For me she ordered Chicken Cannelloni.  Everything was delicious (including the leftovers that I had for lunch yesterday).

One of the reasons that I invented this tradition is so that we are forced to try new dishes at restaurants.  Other than me, the rest of the family plays it fairly safe when eating out.  The kids stick with pizza, chicken or burgers.  The wife orders chicken 95% of the time.  I on the other hand am the adventurous one (though the wife will sample my food but that does not count as being adventurous since she has her dish as a backup in case she does not like it).  However on Monday, I was the only one that got to try anything new (the Mama's Trio was just chicken, chicken and lasagna).  The wife's birthday is in 10 days so we will do it all over again soon.  We started with her birthday last year (avoiding having a then 5 year old order for everyone since she could not read very big words then) so now we have completed the first year of this "tradition".  I put the word in quotes since I don't think you can consider it a tradition until you have done it twice.  Maybe next year at this time I can fully consider it a family tradition but for now, it is just something we have done for each family member.  I am guessing though that wherever we go for the wife's birthday dinner, she will order chicken.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon