drinks all around!

i am busting! busting to tell this story! i promise you i do not rig situations or embellish these stories.....this IS my life. and i love it! i so wanted to tell this as soon as we got home last night, but i had a wicked bad headache and it was pretty late.

ok, i don't want to leave anything out so i'll start from before the beginning. sometime in the afternoon, i text messaged nathan asking if he wanted a baked potato or a sweet potato. a little while later he called and said, "put dinner on hold. we're going out with mike and nic tonight."

cool! believe it or not, we've never done that with them. i know. it seems odd. but normally when we do stuff with them, we're with my parents or other friends. so this was going to be great. nic had the deadly task of picking the restaurant (don't you hate being the one to have to pick? i do!). well she did a stellar job--red lobster. i know it's not shells, but it's a pretty good seafood fix when you're not in florida. :)

it was about 6:30 by the time the boys got home from the warehouse and were all showered up. unfortunately, for people with very small children, they do not take call ahead seating. thankfully, the kids did really well, and our wait was only 20 minutes. we got the kids situated and waited for our waitress. it was very busy....typical friday night probably, so one of the hostesses was helping with our drink order. things were going kind of slow, but we were having a good time, so it wasn't a bad thing. we ordered, got our appetizer and salads.....things were going well. the kids were chowing down those cheesy buscuits. ava and connor were going to split a kids meal, and since connor isn't as good with a straw, ava got the pink lemonade. well, like any kid, she tipped the cup up and it spilled out the straw hole onto her shirt. "my shirt, my shirt! my shirt, my shirt!" poor ava was soaked and freezing cold. thankfully, b/c of connor's recent diaper episodes, i had a dry shirt. crisis averted.

almost.

so we were trying to finish our salads when the hostess came by to see if we needed drink refills. now things were moving. a few minutes later, she came back with a tray full. she put down nic's raspberry lemonade and was just about to bring over our diet cokes when.......SPLASH!!!! nicole stood up pretty quickly, so i knew she got wet. servers were coming over with napkins and wiping down nic's seat and her back. the floor was soaked. slowly, i came to the realization that mike also got wet. i thought just a little b/c of his reaction. then i remebered mike is a pretty laid back, go with the flow kind of guy. nathan asked him how wet he got.....mike turned around and he was SOAKED!! half of his back was wet and it just kept going down. his shirt, t-shirt, pants and the coat he had on the back of the chair......ALL WET. jaws around the table dropped, i totally lost my appetite (b/c i knew a confrotation would follow--i'm like the dinosaur, rex, on toy story), ava started crying...it was great. the manager came over (well, i'd call him the "mini-manager" b/c the general manager was there but NEVER came over to the table). he asked what had happened....i wanted to hit him with a "here's your sign"....hello? ice on the floor, soaking wet patrons? connect the dots.

so he went over to the gm and chatted for a while, then came back and offered mike and nic free dry cleaning and a $30 gift card. nicole said, "don't you think it would be reasonable to offer to pay for our dinners?" mini-man said, "all of your dinners?"
"yeah, we're here with them, now we're soaked and we have to go home so that cuts their night short too." so he goes to see what he can do. nic kept telling him she wasn't mad, but she thought it was a reasonable request and so did we. we felt bad for mini-man b/c he was just the middle man and gm totally should have come over to our table.

after a while, we started laughing about it. well, i was laughing...i'm not sure mike and nic were. people were staring, but thankfully ava had calmed down and was sitting with uncle nate. it was great.

we got our food wrapped up when it came out and headed over to mike and nic's so they could dry off. turned out to be a pretty fun night. we ate in the living room and fought over what to watch on tv, it was great. then ava was feeding connor french fries like he was a puppy. it reminded me of the famous family picture of daniel feeding laura. it was the best night out we've had in a while. free dinner, fun with mike and nic, the kids were hilarious. what more can you want out of a friday night?

before (sort of) ava was wearing a cute cardigan and white t-shirt that got wet with her spill

after

"now, open wide"

"hold still, connor. i can't stuff it in if you're crawling."

the girl's got skills.