Dinners

It would be great if all dinners that we held could be like the one we had yesterday.

Minimum time was spent in the kitchen preparing the 4-course dinner of:

- Vietnamese summer rolls (Gui Cuon)

- Avocado & tofu salad

- Chorizo sandwich

- Macha jelly, azuki beans & ice-cream

We pre-prepared nearly everything beforehand leading to the dinner. I only took less than 10 minutes to grill the chorizos as everyone were helping themselves to the salad and the summer rolls.

Even though one of the gang couldn't make it becos she was rushing to finish reading some 200 CVs, the 6 of us managed to finish all the food on the table meant for 7 persons.

Louis and I had to take turns entertaining Faith throughout the dinner. Still, Faith was on home ground and while it would be a long time before she turns into a good little host, she behaved fairly well throughout dinner.

For these same reasons, Louis and I prefer hosting dinners these days at home rather than to go outside for dinner with friends. Even though we still have to take turns eating and entertaining our little girl, at least, we are within earshot of the conversations.

The night before, we had dinner with Louis' colleague at his wife at Morton's of Chicago @ The Oriental Hotel, sans kids. Since we were all parents ourselves, we unanimously agreed to have our dinner at 6.30 pm.

As we chatted and ate our dinner, we all took turns to look at our watches inconspicuously. When the dessert took some time to show up, neither couples were embarrassed that one of us went forward to request the kitchen to hurry our order.

We all understood that we needed to reach home by 9.30 pm to put our kids to bed.

When dessert was served, we ate quickly, called for the bill and then each made our way home, glancing at our watches still with each set of parent making a call home to check if our kids were doing fine.

It would have seemed almost unimaginable and stark crazy that we would fork out so much to dine at a place like Morton's and not take time to eat and enjoy ourselves. That lifestyle of fine dinning and degustation type of meals that last at least 3 hours or more now seem so foreign with parenthood, as if it was something that happened in our past lives.

Truthfully, we did enjoy our meal. We were just more conscious about the amount of time we spent out and we wanted to balance some couple time with our personal desires to put our kids to bed ourselves.

I guess that's the trade-off of parenthood.

At the end of the day, reaching home and seeing Faith break into a huge smile, coupled with the smacking kisses that she doles out before bedtime makes all the trade-offs worthwhile.