My Family’s Money

I was pretty excited about getting the chance to take my wife out this past Thursday for San Diego’s Restaurant Week. We haven’t gone out to eat at a really nice place since my wife’s birthday so it would have been a pretty nice treat. We wanted to share this with some friends of ours who haven’t gone out to eat at a really nice restaurant in probably longer than we have. They have two kids, a 3 year old and a 6 month old, and just haven’t been able to take each other out with all their obligations and monthly budget situation. So we invited them along on Monday evening, thinking how fun it would be to spend some time with our friends and treat them to a fancy dinner. Being childless right now ourselves, we weren’t really thinking that they might not want to take their kids with them – silly unchilded married people. They quickly informed us of their need for a sitter and let us know they’d have to get back to us.

On Tuesday we come to find out that their regular (free) babysitter, a sister-in-law, isn’t able to watch the kids for them. They probably weren’t going to be able to go out to the dinner. That was not going to happen. You see, by this time it really sounded better to my wife and I to treat our friends to a fancy dinner than it did to go out to one ourselves. We offered to be the babysitters and to treat them to a night on the town. They said they’d get back to us.

Enter Wednesday. Our friends informed us that they wanted us to go on without them, leaving them along the proverbial Oregon Trail to cheaper than usual fancy food. I had left far to many tombstones along that hallowed ground to let our friends become another pair of casualties to the snake bites of tight budgets and the broken wheel of unavailable babysitters. Not that night, not on my watch. So I pressed the issue to see the real reason why our friends were declining our offer. They danced around the issue a little bit, but it boiled down to them feeling a bad about “pushing us out” of going to a nice dinner. Pffff. Lame excuse. It’s better to give than to receive and I wasn’t about to get pushed out of getting something really good by giving to our friends. Eventually, after some eloquent waxing, they finally accepted.

So my Thursday night was not spent eating some dangerous dessert or macking on some juicy ribs. Instead, I got to practice being a parent when your tired from a days work. I got to play Candy Land and build forts. I got to bless my friends. I think my Thursday night was pretty good.