Gracie's Restorodt

So today I get home and before I can even change clothes, Gracie drags me over to her play room door. In front of the door is a sign that reads....

Grace's Restorodt

She says to me,,,,

" come ,,, sit down and enjoy, order like in real life.... I really want your business "

Well, what dad could turn that down huh?

So I enter her Restorodt and sit down at her oh so tiny tea table, you know the kind that fit them just right but put your knees up near your ears, yeah, that kind.

The table is set, table cloth ( blue bandanna ) fork and knife, ( one pink plastic, the other blue ) she then hands me a menu. She must have spent half the day concocting this menu.

She says to me........

" What would you like...."

I then peruse the menu for a while, it takes me a minute to translate because she did this all on her own, her own imagination, as well as her own spelling. After taking a bit too long she says to me.......

" Why don't you order a drink first while you decide, the drinks are here at the bottom"

( okay, I am now certain that we eat out too much)

I order sweet tea....

She then goes, gets a yellow plastic tea cup and a pink princess tea pot and pours me some tea at the table. She then asks.......

" would you like a lemon?"

" no thank you " I reply

( Really, we need to eat at home more, this is ridiculous )

I then order spaghetti with a cup of vegetable soup.

She searches and searches and cant find a suitable cup for a cup of soup. She then asks me if a mug would be okay. Well of course it is.

She then presents me with a kool-aid mug with a plastic leaf, a plastic potato, and a plastic carrot stuffed down in it. Ya know, she really made vegetable soup, plastic though it was, she hit on the ingredients pretty darn well. While I was chewing on my lettuce leaf she hunted me up a pink plastic plate and went over to her stove to cook up the spaghetti. When she noticed the lettuce leaf in my mouth she abruptly expounded upon the fault in her service.

" Oh no daddy, I forgot to give you a spoon, you need a spoon for soup"

She quickly brought me a yellow plastic spork to enjoy my Kool-aid mug full of plastic vegetable soup. Then back to slave away in her kitchen.

A minute or two later she plopped the plastic spaghetti, sauce included, on the pink plate and served it from the right.

I continued to enjoy my meal until I had satisfactorily consumed all the delicious delicacies supplied by my little Hunan entrepreneur. Once finished I arose fulfilled and satisfied with my fine dinning experience. However, now this is priceless. She now informed me that this was a restaurant, just like real life, and I needed to tend to my bill. She had manufactured a check out station from a pink two step stool with a compartment in the high step. She opened her " register" to present me with a bill for twenty dollars and 30 cents. She settled for 4 quarters and 3 dimes, but I was impressed by the fact that she actually had written me up a tab. Something tells me that daddy is gonna get suckered into this every once in a while.

Once it was done, I requested that I be able to take the menu with me. She asked why, and I answered that if I took the menu home with me I could be prepared for later and maybe drop in for carry out. She then informed me that if I call ahead, she can deliver. The truth is that I wanted the menu so I could share it with you all. She obviously put a lot of time and effort into it.

Grace's Restorodt ( what the sign actually read outside her playroom )

• Sasue and chips
• makenrone chees
• fish stiks
• vecndbre soop ( vegetable soup, I needed a minute on this one)
• sofla (souffle, I didnt know she knew that word )
• spagetee
• sweet tea
• woater
• dokd peper ( doctor pepper, one of daddy's favorites)
• coke
• Grace's thick milk ( whole milk )
• Milk
• Choklet milk
• smootheez
• bnanu smoothee (banana smoothie )

Maybe its just me, but this list was priceless.

Maybe its just me, but I think we need to eat at home more.

Maybe its just me, but I am proud of her effort and imagination. Yes the spelling is terrible, but she was playing, not applying herself under a school situation or with any supervision what so ever.

It amazes me that not so long ago she could not even say a lot of these words, now she forms them into large complex ideas and attempts to write them down to imitate " real life "

Slow down my dear Gracie, your growing quit fast enough, please don't rush it..... daddy likes having a little cuddle bug named boogs around. I don't think I am ready for a teenager with a job just yet.

Oh yeah, the end of the meal came with her saying,

" Please come again "