Capellini Pomodoro, please, with a side of stingy child and crazy lady...

Ok, I've decided to kick-start my "real" blogging with a somewhat amusing (at least to me) tale of our recent trip to Olive Garden. Please note that I have come up with my own descriptive names for the story's "characters" (with the exception of Andrew - not my cousin), because I didn't hear their real names...and it makes my story more colorful because you fully get a visual of the actual scene.

I, along with my mom and Emma, decided to have a nice girls' dinner at the aforementioned restaurant the other night, which we do on a pretty regular basis (the dinner, not necessarily the restaurant). As always, there was a line, so we put in our name, got our bright red buzzer, and awaited our turn to be seated. Since Emma is a toddler and finds it necessary to get into all things breakable, movable, or dirty as soon as Mommy turns her head, I decided to distract her with her Elmo cell phone that I so "smartly" (one of my words for the Shepptionary) packed in her diaper bag. She MAYBE got ten seconds of playtime with it, when it happened. Every mother's nightmare came true - this grungy, dirty, runny-nosed boy, approximately eight years old, decides to come and whip it out of her hand. Normally, I would feel very sorry for a child like this, because I would think that he needed someone to take him aside and wash him up and give him a Kleenex to blow his nose. His sharp attitude, however, soon changed my mind about him. First of all, don't touch my child, or her toys, unless you ask first and I approve. Second, you're too old for Elmo. Go find some other kid with a Hot Wheel, steal that toy, and watch that child look upon you in disbelief and their mother in horror. I looked at "Captain Dirty Nails" (understandable when you're out playing, but not when you're about to eat dinner) and said "Excuse me, but that is my daughter's toy. You don't just snatch it out of her hand. Please give it back to her." He proceeds to tell me "I want to play with it." I told him "It's hers. Please give it back now." While his mother looks blankly onto the situation, I pull out my Mama Bear face and take it back and give it to Emma. I would have wiped it down first, but Emma never sticks things in her mouth, so I decided it would be more polite to wait until we could go into the bathroom and handle it with wipes. Well, as soon as Emma gets it back, she looks on me with shame, then gives the toy back to the boy, as if to say "Mommy! Shame on you! We need to share!" Of course, I want to enstill in her the importance of unselfishness and kindness, so I let him play with it while I sulked in the chair. Shortly thereafter, his little brother, Andrew (as I heard this kid yell over and over), approximately six, asked nicely if he could play with it. Slightly cleaner than his older brother, I said "Yes, because you asked very nicely. Thank you." Well, Captain wouldn't give it to him, and so I was forced to pull out the "Well, since no one can play nicely with it, it's going back in the bag." Well, Emma took it back out, gave me the same look of shame and gave it to Andrew. It's amazing how you can learn some very important life lessons while trying to teach them to your child. I'm sure God was looking upon me laughing hysterically at this point.

Along with Andrew, Captain, and Mommy Do-Nothing-About-It came Daddy Vicariously, older sister Antagonist and Aunt No-Values. Antagonist kept bugging Captain to the point that he would yell and yell and hollar at her. His mother kept saying "You can't yell in a restaurant like this" (which leads me to wonder - what restaurant CAN you yell in, other than Ceasarland or Chuck E. Cheese? Take me to it...). So, when a baby boy that was all of six months old begins to cutely yell "BA BA BA BA BA!!!", Captain runs over to the mother and says "MAKE HIM STOP YELLING!" to which she replied "He's only a baby, sweetie, he doesn't know what he's doing." He responded "If I can't yell, neither can he!!!!" and runs back, all while draping the hood of his coat on his head pretending to fly like a superhero (hence, "Captain"). I then hear the aunt talking to Antagonist saying "You can't let them bench you like that. Just get in their face and tell them what for!" This was quickly followed by her father saying "There was never any glory is passing the ball. When you get it, just shoot and score!!!" Great set of values you're teaching there, Pops, with the help of Auntie Dearest. All of a sudden, the sweet release of the buzzer goes off, and we're called to our table. THANK YOU LORD! The horridness of crazy people around us is over... Or so I thought.

We arrive to our table, but before we can plant our weary backsides into the chairs, a strange lady approaches us with a look of total astonishment on her face. All she can say is "Ugh! I.... I just... Ugh!" and walks to the table across from us. She pulls her granddaughter over to the table (who was just days younger than Emma) and says "THEY COULD BE TWINS!!!" This supposed "could-be-twin" of my daughter's was of Mexican descent had longer, curly black hair, darker skin, brown eyes, and a thinner face. She was also short. As you can tell by Emma's pictures (or knowing her personally), she is tall with auburnish blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin and is of Polish, English and Belgain descent (with bloodlines from the South, Germany and Wales, too) - NOTHING like Isabella at Olive Garden. It would be like telling Elizabeth Hasselbeck that she could pass for Whoopi Goldberg's twin - I don't think so. This crazy lady then proceeds to ask if she can take a picture of Emma to send to her sister so that she can marvel over the resemblence. She didn't seem like the type to sell pictures of children on the internet, so I hesitantly said "Uhhh... I guess", an answer that I regret to this day. I think I let her because I was so taken aback by all the events that happened to us; all before we were even sitting in our chairs. Thank the Lord the rest of our meal was delicious as always. We were starting to wonder if we were destined to have something drastically wrong with our meals - such as a piece of a tooth filling in our spaghetti, or a rat tail in the fettucini. It would have gone with the rest of the night...