Ridgewalker on Fast Food

My mother tells me that food is my friend. There are times in my life that I beg to differ. I say, food is a big, fat hassle (pun intended). The only affordable, easy food clogs up the arteries, and gives me the runs. Do you love it? News program after news article talks about how the number of overweight Americans keeps rising. I hate these programs. The average fast food combo contains 2-3 times as much food than an average adult needs. “Combo” that with the fact that we eat this junk 5 or 10 times a week. Why do news programs feel the need to explain this over and over again? It’s not hard to figure out; just let it go! We eat junk, and we eat a lot of it.

Personally, I can't make up my mind about fast food. I mean, I know it's bad for me, but it's cheap, fast, and it tastes really good. Life is full of dilemmas.

Besides, I despise cooking. What a pain. First, you have to clean the kitchen, which has gradually been destroyed during the previous 24 hours. This, in itself, takes me about an hour. Then you do your prep stuff and preheating. Then comes the actual cooking. Finally we eat. This takes a shockingly short amount of time, considering that eating is the point of the whole process. Then comes the after-dinner rituals: cleaning the baby, cleaning the table, cleaning the high chair, and picking up all the food that missed the baby’s mouth and hit the true target- the floor. (Ridgewalker’s time-saver: If your kid doesn’t eat things off the floor, just let that food sit there a while. Once it dries, you can get it with the Dust Buster.)

Speaking of the baby... My 16-month-old son learned about fast food months ago. Money goes out the window, food comes in. Neat trick, Mommy. We rarely eat in the actual burger joints. Eating in those places invites a whole new host of problems. Here’s an example; this happened the last time we went in to eat.

For once, L sat still and ate like an angel. Sometimes he eats handfuls of ketchup while we’re not looking, but this time he just delicately dipped his food. Sometimes he insists on sitting in the high chair backwards (the better to see...), but this time he sat straight and didn’t even try to climb out once. You could practically see the halo, and I thought we were going to get out of there without incident. Ha.

We stood, and I went to lift him from his chair when I noticed there was some kind of stuff all over his back and the chair. “What in the world has he got all over him?” I wondered. I leaned closer and got a whiff of the most massive poop explosion I’d ever seen in my life. A poop catastrophe of epic proportions. A caa caa cataclysm. “Oh... my... God,” said my husband. L didn’t have the runs or anything, but the amount of poo was truly stunning. I think he’d been storing it. It had squooshed out the legs of the diaper, and it had smooshed out the back. Then he’d sat back in it, and it squashed all over the back of the high chair. All this while he was happily munching away on his chicken and fries. No sign, no signal, no warning. No changing table in the restroom.

So I went and asked to speak to the manager. When she came to the counter, I said, “My son had an accident. I need something to clean the high chair... Uhh... Disinfectant or something.” She heaved a huge sigh. I walked back to our booth and we started cleaning L up. When we finished, we had exactly one baby wipe left. (Yes we stripped our poo-covered baby and cleaned him right there in the restaurant. I wasn’t about to take him out in the 90 degree heat to change him. The way I figure it, restaurants that don’t have changing tables in the restrooms had better expect to see naked baby butts in the dining room from time to time.)

Suddenly the manager came up to us, followed by a crew of 3 or 4 people wearing rubber gloves. The manager whipped out a paper, and says “You’ll need to fill out this incident form, corporate policy, blah blah blah, lawsuit protection, blah blah blah...” We looked at her, bewildered. “But...” I said, “it’s just poo...” Her eyes dropped to the poopy chair, and she said, “Oh! That kind of accident!.” She picked her form back up, and yelled at the employees who’d tried to sneak away when they caught sight of the chair.

Embarassing? Oh yeah. But maybe it’s just another reason to stay away from fast food.