Family Restaurant Survival Guide

Quality Time: Restaurant Rescue Kit. What could be more relaxing at the end of a long day than sitting down with your family at a local restaurant? Pretty much anything. We have all seen that family at the restaurant, right, and we are are seeing them, kids are melting down. Sometimes we are that family, but we shouldn't always be that way. We should be able to go to a restaurant with our family. We need to. Sometimes we just got to take a break from cooking. From time to time, you have got to go to a restaurant. How do you keep from it being a nightmare? Maybe just kind of a bad dream. We want to make sure that an outing to a restaurants stays in the quality time category and doesn't cross over into the things I am going to talk about with my therapists some day category. So, we have got an idea, the Restaurant Rescue Kit. This little baby is going to help keep your restaurant outings, quality time. So, let's dig into the goody bag, and see what they have got in there. Most important thing, right here is this book. For game ideas, activities, fun things, jokes, all kinds of stuff that you do with your kids, there's a lots of good ideas in here about how to play the kit. The kit itself, you have got a little drawing pad here. If you need to sketch some ideas, you can do a little tic-tac-toe right there. Don't let your kids beat you at tic-tac-toe, or they will think you're stupid. Alright, some other things we have got is this plastic mat, a little game in itself, you toss a coin, they have that many bites of food or whatever. You got lots of stickers in here. I Heart the Interns. They are appropriate, heart, just a friendly, you love your guys heart. Those are in there. Dice. It's great to see these little baggies, being is for legitimate purpose. My question is, there's lots of games in there that you can teach the kids to play. My feeling is, why not craps? Seven! Line away, suckers. There are more of these. There are more dice in here. These are dice that have letters on. Cool! Great! Ready and I can't spell, I can't spell anything with that. Here is a thing. You may discover that your kids are really stupid, when you are doing this. They may not be able to spell their own names. I love the dice. These things, these are pipe cleaners, and when you are in college, you used them to do maintenance, but you can make animals with these, all kinds of things, colorful little animals, and there is great instructions in the book, how to make little animals. This is clay, modeling clay, everybody knows that. Clays, a pushy substance that you play with. You can use this -- if you are going to use this modeling clay, by the way, here's a little tip. Make sure you use the mat or you use table top or something like that, because this will real stick to the table, and you only want to do damage to the restaurant, that's minimal. I mean this really could do major damage that they can charge you for. Head, hand, and this is actually, mostly for the grown ups. So you can pass notes to your wife, that the kids won't be able to see, 'Honey, I think we need to leave the youngest one here.' And of course a great thing called beads, and you can use these on the pipe cleaners. There are all kinds of games, you can use these for their stake, when they are playing cracks, everybody gets a certain number of beads, and you take them from the children, win those. And of course the crayons, Classic Staple, you have got to have these and also, tooth picks. You can do a great game, picksy sticks or pickup sticks. Great game of pickup sticks using just the tooth picks. Pretty cool! So, you have literally got dozens of different kinds of activities that you can do with the kids. One mistake you don't want to make, don't pour all the stuff out at once, right. You are the guy that's in control of the activities going on with the kids. If you pull the kit out and you just give it to the kids, obviously, they are just going to dump all the stuff out. Most of it's going to end up on the floor and it's going to be more trouble than it was without the kit. Do it out, one at a time. You might even think about leaving the bag in the car, and just pulling out one or two of the activities, and taking that with you, into the restaurant. Total cost of the kit is about $30 retail, which seems pretty pricey, but if you think about it, there are enough activities in here to probably get you through one meal a month, and how much more often do you want to eat out with your kids than that? Pick one of these kits up at restaurantrescuekits.com. That's all for us this week on quality time. If you have got some ideas about how to spend quality time at a restaurant, please join us on dadlabs.com. Start a discussion, join the conversation. Let's talk about taking those kids out to dinner at dadlabs.com.