Trouble Maker
I think this post has a lot of potential to offend, so I'm going to start with a couple of rules:
1) If the restaurant has a playland, your child can scream for as long as it wants, as loud as it wants.
2) If the restaurant has any menu item that is "market price," it is rude of you to not remove said child after more than a minute of screaming.
If you don't agree, just stop reading right now.
I know there's a lot of grey area between the two, and I'm comfortable with that. I also know that there's some ambiguity as to which rule to follow in a restaurant with both a playland and market price lobster, but I'm fine with playland winning out on that.
So after several minutes of crying and screaming from not two feet behind me while the rest of the table continued to ignore the baby, I turned around and gave the mother a nasty look. Just a glance, just in case she thought her table were in some kind of cone of silence and she wasn't actually inflicting that shrill sound on the people around her who didn't order a medium rare rib eye with a side of colic. Gosh, 5 minutes of screaming, crying kid you can ignore, but a couple seconds of a stranger's angry face obviously needs to be addressed. Her response was to start yelling at the back of my head about how she'd like to know how I would balance a sick baby and a social life. Really, my options were to do what? Continue to be berated for her sense of entitlement? Engage her in a dialog?
I flipped her off.
She called me rude, but she shut the fuck up. Another minute and an older woman at the table decided that maybe she should take the screaming baby somewhere else, but not without a long speech in my direction that I missed most of because I was actually having a good time with my husband. I did catch that I don't have children and probably never will. Maybe she's a psychic. I didn't pay any attention to them after that as they weren't hurting my ears and there was some pretty good steak in front of me. After we left, Bill said that he'd heard them talking about us as we walked past on our way out and he didn't know why. My bird was so casually deployed that he didn't even see me do it.
I have to admit that I'm a little delighted to think I might have ruined their evening.
1) If the restaurant has a playland, your child can scream for as long as it wants, as loud as it wants.
2) If the restaurant has any menu item that is "market price," it is rude of you to not remove said child after more than a minute of screaming.
If you don't agree, just stop reading right now.
I know there's a lot of grey area between the two, and I'm comfortable with that. I also know that there's some ambiguity as to which rule to follow in a restaurant with both a playland and market price lobster, but I'm fine with playland winning out on that.
So after several minutes of crying and screaming from not two feet behind me while the rest of the table continued to ignore the baby, I turned around and gave the mother a nasty look. Just a glance, just in case she thought her table were in some kind of cone of silence and she wasn't actually inflicting that shrill sound on the people around her who didn't order a medium rare rib eye with a side of colic. Gosh, 5 minutes of screaming, crying kid you can ignore, but a couple seconds of a stranger's angry face obviously needs to be addressed. Her response was to start yelling at the back of my head about how she'd like to know how I would balance a sick baby and a social life. Really, my options were to do what? Continue to be berated for her sense of entitlement? Engage her in a dialog?
I flipped her off.
She called me rude, but she shut the fuck up. Another minute and an older woman at the table decided that maybe she should take the screaming baby somewhere else, but not without a long speech in my direction that I missed most of because I was actually having a good time with my husband. I did catch that I don't have children and probably never will. Maybe she's a psychic. I didn't pay any attention to them after that as they weren't hurting my ears and there was some pretty good steak in front of me. After we left, Bill said that he'd heard them talking about us as we walked past on our way out and he didn't know why. My bird was so casually deployed that he didn't even see me do it.
I have to admit that I'm a little delighted to think I might have ruined their evening.