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Most of the time I like to use my parents and my in-laws as scapegoats for the reason my kids have every thing they want/need. My mother-in-law will swim with them at the drop of the hat, and if it’s winter, climb in the jacuzzi with them. My father-in-law is forever bringing home peaches, soda, doughnuts, jelly beans to feed the kids. My mother just bought them Floam and my son shrieked like a little girl he was so excited. She also treats them to the movies, turned her backyard into a giant sandbox, and swingset. My dad will go anywhere they lead, if they want to swing, that’s fine, if they want to have cookies, that’s fine, if they want to play on the computer, he’ll do his best, or if they want to dance, he’ll turn up the stereo so loud it’ll hurt your ears.

So all this is really just ways of showing love to my kids, right? They aren’t SpoileD! They know that the answer is sometimes “No”. They don’t always like it but they live with it.

So Tuesday night, my son wants to have a ‘date’ with me, where we go and so something, just the two of us. I couldn’t really think of anything to squeeze in the hour before he’d need to be home for bed, so I consulted with my husband. “Can we eat outside tonight?”

So we carried our dining room table outside, and chairs. I went to my mother-in-laws and borrowed a white table cloth, tapered candles, fun dinnerware for the kids, and popcorn.

Unfortunately, Suzanne was kind of thrown off by the whole thing, and was upset for a bit. Getting her a straw seemed to settle her down, but then spraying Off! bug repellent on her legs set her off again, b/c she said it hurt (must have been on the scraped knee I forgot about). She calmed down once we began to eat.

We were having some new sausage we hadn’t tried before and I told Suzanne that if she didn’t like it she could spit it on the ground. She tried it, didn’t, spit it, and then giggled b/c she was happy to spit on the ground. When we finished our dinner, we let Ethan throw his leftover corn in the yard. He was too happy to oblige.

Unfortunately, the squirrels don’t like the leftover cucumbers my hubby tossed in the yard, so it’ll take a few days for those to decompose enough to not be noticed.

Overall, we had a great time, and I’d love to do it again. The weather was warm, but not to hot, the allergy season was non-existent so we didn’t sneeze a lot, and the ant didn’t climb onto the table till we were packing it up. We trapsed in a little grass, but it was easily swept up. No one got any new bug bites that I know of, so that was good too.

Here’s a picture of the table before we finished carrying everything out.