A Night on the Town

Wifey and I decided to splurge a bit tonight, so we went out to dinner. We headed over to the mall about 3:30 after Munchkin woke up from her 2.5 hour nap (hooray!) and started walking around. Munchkin loved being out and about in her stroller as long as we kept moving. It gets really boring when you are a toddler who is stuck in the middle of clothing prints, no matter how colorful.

After a couple of hours, we ended up heading over to the food court. I'm sure some of you are thinking in your head hey wait a minute. Isn't this guy pretty much unemployed? Where is he getting enough money to buy dinner for a family in the mall food court? And you would be completely right. The fact is, we don't have money to throw at a mall food court, no matter how reasonable it might be. That is why we decided to go the gourmet route—we brought our own food.

Dinner consisted of homemade sandwiches (two for me, one for Wifey), chips, yogurt and mini muffins for Munchkin, and drinks from our water bottles. I am pretty sure that the employees of the various stores in the food court were hoping that we would come up and buy a dessert from them. Wifey and I both approached the counter of Orange Julius at separate times, but it was only to nab napkins.

We even brought dessert, which consisted of Nabisco snacks that had chocolate on them for one reason or another.

So, next time you really want to go out to eat knowing that your budget doesn't agree, just do what we did. Find a slow Thursday and eat in the food court.

We were punished by the mall gods though. On our way home we ran into terrible traffic because of a four car pileup on the Interstate. The fifteen minute drive became an hour, and I spent a lot of time singing songs to Munchkin to keep her entertained. She was a good sport and lasted about 45 minutes, and then we caved and gave her a binky and Monks, her stuffed monkey. I felt bad that the mall gods had to take it out on four other cars, but I think we got the better end of the deal. They did tempt me to want to go into the Apple store in hopes that I could catch a glimpse of the new MacBook Pros, but I decided I had better avoid it and save my coveting for another day.