Five hours of free time!
My husband and I were able to get away for a few hours yesterday afternoon. It was just the two of us, no children. That just doesn’t happen very often! We hired a babysitter that we know from our church and took off to get our Christmas shopping started. We even went so far as to take the carseats out of the car so it really felt like we were on our own without children! (Well, I guess the seats were taken out for extra storage but it still helped with the atmosphere!)
On our five free hours we decided it would be fun to try out a restaurant we’ve never been to before. There were several options. There is a buffet we’ve thought about, Chili’s and the LongHorn Steakhouse. I think it’s always difficult to try out a new restaurant when you’ve got three children tagging along and you have no idea what you’ll be able to order for them. We’ve been wanting to try out Chilies for a little while now so we decided this was the time to do so.
We got to the restaurant a little before 3:00 so it was pleasantly quiet. There was no loud music blaring, no children crying and nobody for me to feed other than myself. Having never been there before, it took us just a little while to peruse the menu and find just the right meal. It’s so hard to choose when you have no prior experience with their particular “flavor.” Finally, after much deliberation, we decided to go with the bottomless soup and salad and the included bottomless chips and salsa.
Since it’s not possible to push an X10 Big Red Button and have your dinner delivered in a flash, we decided to go with something light that shouldn’t take too long for them to prepare. We wanted more than fastfood but at the same time we didn’t want to spend all of our free time at the restaurant! Thankfully, the food did come in pretty good timing. My husband had the chili and I had the mashed potato soup and we each had a house salad. Everything was good but I must admit I was a little disappointed in the choices for salad dressing. I like Italian Dressing and their citric balsamic dressing just didn’t sound like the taste I wanted. I went with oil and vinegar which was okay but Italian would have been best!
Being as we went with a light lunch, we decided to go for a dessert. With speed similar to the working of an X10 SuperSocket Receptacle we had our little shot glasses filled with Key Lime Pie and Cinnamon Roll goodness. Soon we were off to finish our shopping and then to relieve the babysitter. Believe it or not, she said she’ll actually be able to watch the kids again sometime! My husband and I are thinking it would be nice to get out once or twice a month, just the two of us.