Sam Does Love To Dine Out

And as one might imagine, we never know what to expect. He is not much of an eater, so he ends up with too much time on his hands and gets into various "situations". He also has volume-control issues, so we're forever having to shush him. Then, there's the probability that he will talk to a complete stranger before we can stop him or anticipate what he's going to say.

Sunday night, we took Sam and Jay to eat Chinese--Sam's favorite type of restaurant. I think that is in large part due to the fact that he can make a meal off of chicken and ice cream, but he eats himself silly, so we go. It's one of the few places we probably get our money's worth for his meal. And, just like most trips, he didn't disappoint--he had done so well with not blurting out random comments to people, but, finally, he couldn't control himself:

"Pardon me, are you an employee here?"

This was Sam's question to a server at the Chinese buffet restaurant last night. I wasn't sure where to find a bowl for ice cream, so he immediately took it upon himself to solve the problem--after all, a boy needs his ice cream, right? I was most proud of his manners and his sentence and even complimented him on his nice questions. It's a fine line, of course, since the next time he might just as easily ask someone why they are so old, or why that man's teeth look rotten. But this time, he did well. and the look on the lady's face was priceless as she told him that she was and then directed us to the bowls.

Sam was soon enjoying a bowl of rainbow sherbert which he has named, "Wild and Reckless"...the perfect dessert for the kid who for no apparent reason decided to use his body to form a human letter E on the floor by the buffet earlier, if you ask me (he was most pissed that I didn't applaud his efforts and instead chastized him for being on the floor. I did give him mad props for his interpretation of F a few moment later since he did that one vertically, albeit while blocking the lo mein, but it was definitely an improvement).

Oh, and somehow he managed to eat a piece of black olive that was on his pizza (obviously not a totally traditional Chinese buffet, eh, but quite good), so he was traumatized. Convinced that the olive was burning his tonsils and stomach due to some weird acid found only in olives, he was hesitant to consider that maybe, just maybe it was the spicey pizza sauce. Various olive comments came up from time to time throughout the meal (he was most proud of himself for "eating a vegetable), but I thought the topic was pretty much closed...which of course, it wasn't. The first thing he said to me this morning? "I guess I survived from eating that olive since I'm alive today."

Olive trauma. I'm sure somewhere later in life, there will be therapy for this.