Eating out

Joey has been doing a lot of this in the mornings, lately.

We had plans to go out and see a Children's Musuem new today, it being a half-day of school, but when the kids rushed home and begged to play with their friends instead, that sounded so much easier.

The weather's changed and it's chilly again, so the kids wanted to be inside. Ella offered to teach her friends one of her very complicated games.  Alex was meant to be on Ella's team, and NochElla and Paul were paired as well, but it soon became clear to the other two that this was really a contest between Ella and Paul, who were absolutely relishing the competition and played for about two hours.

So I think we've determined this really is for the kids.  They
turned the water tap on, finally, and it's been great fun for
the kids, having a sandbox with it's own water source.

NochElla, herself the youngest, was happy to have an little brother for a day and seemed to have a lot of fun taking Alex under her wing.  She's a tidy, domestic little thing, so they spent the afternoon cleaning up the sandbox, scraping the sand out of the fountain. Alex was a very willing minion.

When it was time to send the kids home, I thanked them for coming over, and Paul told me, earnestly, "Oh, well, I could come back anytime. You know, if you'd like.  Like, um...when can I come back? I could come back after tea. If you want."

"That's really good of you, Paul. But, how about you and Ella play on Friday, instead?" I suggested.

"Yeah! Friday! Okay, we could do Friday!"

Friends are the best. I'm glad for my kids.

Dennis felt like leaving work a little early, and we thought it might be fun to eat out for a change.  I can count on my hand the number of times we've eaten in restaurants in Zurich: they're expensive and not so much fun when you're toting three kids. But on Saturday, when we were out and about, I noticed an interestingly crowded restaurant called Iroquois: online reviews call it the best Tex-Mex and burger restaurant in Zürich.  Oh, momma!

Dennis and I both have a soul-deep love of Tex-Mex, in all it's cheesy, deep-fried, cilantro-free glory.  The first restaurant we tried in Zürich was Desperado, which is advertised as Tex-Mex and which Brits seem to adore.  I suppose we should have been wary when we noticed mozzarella sticks were on the menu.  We actually got an order of those, for the kids, and they were ultimately the best thing on our table: it turned out that everything else we ordered tasted vaguely like spaghetti sauce, too.  So we haven't gone back, not even for the $26 spaghetti-sauce-and-chicken enchilada.

But this...this could be real!  It looked dingy and unpretentious and the bartender was watching baseball on the TV.

But, although they enjoyed America's best cuisine and past-time, they kept European hours. The kitchen didn't even open until 6:30, otherwise known as bath time in our house.

I'd held off on giving the kids snacks because I'd wanted them to be hungry for dinner, and oh, they were.  But they agreed to walk up towards the lake, as we did on Saturday, where maybe we could have Chinese food, or maybe go to one of the Biergartens.  No, and no.  Only on weekend were those open.

The walk was kind of fun, though. We learned from the posted signs that the Zürich Marathon is this coming Sunday.

(I tell you this so that maybe I have a chance of remembering it as well: I still give myself even odds of forgetting and then becoming absolutely flummoxed when the buses and trams shut down on Sunday.)

When Dennis mentioned the marathon, Ella ears perked up: "Marathon? Are there prizes? Can I do that?"

"I don't know, Ella, do you think you could do 26 miles?" I asked.

"I can!" piped Alex, "I can do a marathon! Watch."

And then he grinned said "One." And then he smiled up at us again said "Two." Another silly grin: "Three." And another: "Four."

Dennis caught on first. "Oh, no, Alex, I'm sorry.  It's not twenty-six smiles..."

We decided to work our way home. Because we'd mentioned Chinese food, Alex had a hankering for fried rice again, and so we ate at the closest take-out to our house. One day, when I walked by with a wailing Joey, one of the waitresses heard him and popped out with clementine to cheer him up.  I've been meaning to go back to eat ever since.

As I'd suspected, it was really child-friendly, even with a bookshelf of puzzles and books for the kids.  I think we were all a little too tired and hungry to appreciate it all, although Ella was really taken with the "amazing" pictures on laminated placemats, and Alex couldn't take his eyes off the exotic hanging lanterns.  "Oh," he sighed. "This is a really fancy restaurant, isn't it, mom."


For us, apparently, yep!