Hovering Over The Table

For the past ten years, my wife and I have prepared meals, set the table, and served dinner in accordance with the standard issue Feeding Manual For Children. Our daughters, in response, have always turned up their noses at anything we offered. It's a challenge, but I learned to adapt.

As a part of the overall process of feeding offspring, we supplied the standard parental encouragement: "Eat up, it's good for you." It rarely works and that probably has something to do with the fact that you can apply that general description to everything short of household cleaners, asphalt, and cow patties.

In fact, it is so routinely ignored that it hardly merits the oxygen expended to say it for the 10,996th time at the dinner table. Typically, our kids take one bite of something they consider semi-edible, and then push the rest of the food around in a circle until it resembles a cow pattie. After that, they suddenly develop a life threatening stomachache and sprint to the bathroom.

In the end, it means that there is always leftover food at the Sartain dinner table. After a while, I began to see the leftover food as less of a waste and more as a bonus meal. And since the girls were all in the bathroom pretending to be food poisoned, I decided that it would be okay to borrow a bite or two from their plates.

Over time, I slowly began to drift into a more aggressive form of scavenging. When we would sit down to eat, I would wait for the girls to take their first bite, then I would pounce on them. "Are you going to get a stomachache now?" After they got over the initial shock of my question, they would nod vigorously, and flee the room.

Eventually, it occurred to me that it would make more sense for me to not even serve my own plate. Instead, I'd hold off eating just long enough for the girls to make their dramatic dash to the bathroom. Pretty soon, I stopped sitting down, too, and just hovered over the dinner table like a wingless vulture ... waiting.

Somewhere along the line, it all just got to be second nature with me, like it was the most natural thing in the world. But as it turns out, there are a lot of things that you can do in the privacy of your home that don't work so well in the world at large. At least, that's what my wife says.

We had gone out to dinner - alone. It was a weird feeling being able to move about freely without having to keep up with three extended appendages, but we managed. After we were seated, the waitress appeared. My wife ordered a pasta dish and then the waitress turned to me. "I'll just have water," I smiled. She nodded and left.

My wife looked at me and asked, "You're not going to order anything to eat? Are you not feeling well?"

"I'm fine," I said. "As a matter of fact, I'm starving."

"Well then, are you on some kind of weird diet?"

"No, I'm going to eat," I told her. "I'm having steak."

My wife looked puzzled again. "Well, why didn't you order one?"

"Don't have to," I answered and motioned with my beak to the next table over. My wife looked across the way and then back at me like she was mentally calculating the cost of serious psychological treatment. But before she could say anything, I leaned over toward the next table and said encouragingly to the couple sitting there, "Ummmm, steak for supper. Eat up, it's good for you. After you finish, you can go to the den and watch television."

Dinner was delicious. My dessert was a little cold by the time I got it, but I'm used to that. As it turned out, Lydia didn't have much of an appetite. For some reason, she took one bite of her meal and spent the rest of the evening in the bathroom. On the way home, she said something about having a stomachache from having to live with a headache.

I guess it's harder for some people to adapt than others.