carbonated joy

Our granddaughter, the simply amazing Moonpie McLovenugget, is eleven months old.
For most of her life her diet has consisted of grayish formula that smells like plant food.
Lately that has changed!
She is the proud owner of seven and a half teeth!! This opens up endless dining opportunities!
The world is her oyster…WAIT!…Who would give an oyster to a baby? The world is her chicken nugget!
So this means that when we go out to eat, she isn’t just a car seat bound spectator anymore, she is an active participant…sometimes VERY active.
Most of the time she is awesome. She is content to eat a little, flirt with the server, and wave at whoever is seated around us.
But yesterday…
Maybe we should have known better. She was tired. We had been playing at the park for an hour. She was a little fussy.
But, we didn’t read the signs, we were hungry. So we stopped at our favorite Italian restaurant down the street from our house. It’s called Pomodoros, which is Italian for “tomatoes”. You know it’s going to be delicious because they celebrate the tomato. They serve amazing food and play great music, they also have fantastic lunch specials…we were blinded by that.
We were seated right in the middle of everything…awesome.
The Moonpie tried to eat the complimentary kid’s crayons. When we wouldn’t let her eat the red crayon, she flung it across the restaurant. It bounced off a man’s lasagna and skidded to a stop on his table.
Then it seemed she tried to do that magic trick where you jerk a table cloth (or in this case, a large napkin) out from under glasses and silverware without disturbing anything.
She has some work to do.
She has suddenly developed some serious grabbing skills. She moves with the speed and dexterity of an over caffeinated jungle cat ninja. It would be really impressive, if she wasn’t grabbing your sweet tea. She moved with lightning quick quickness to grab anything within her limited reach.
At the same time she was dropping her sippy cup every 47 seconds because it’s funny watching Big Papi try to bend over and retrieve a Minnie Mouse cup.
We had ordered her some noodles, they arrived at the table. There didn’t seem to be that many on the plate. Diana chopped some up and put them on the Moonpie’s highchair.
THAT is when the massacre started.
Those poor noodles never had a chance.
The Moonpie was grabbing noodles in both of her chunky fists and flinging then over her head.
Angel hair pasta was flying around in a crazy buttery pasta frenzy.
She would stop occasionally long enough to make a happy squeal and point at something that she wanted…a French fry, a chunk of bread, the Parmesan cheese jar. She was clearly having a blast.
Through it all, the pasta flew.
Those poor defenseless noodles!
Oh the humanity!!
We decided the massacre must end. We got up to leave and realized that there was a mountain of dead noodles under our table. It seems like the pasta had multiplied in a crazy culinary miracle. Our table was a mess. Sorry Pomodoros!
I had noodles in my beard, Diana had barely been able to touch her lunch.
I got the Moonpie out of her high chair. She seemed to be covered in butter, marinara sauce, and bread crumbs.
As we hastily scurried out the front door, I swear my eleven month old grand baby looked at the hostess and said in a chirpy voice…
“Ciao baby”