The Kid Version of "The Diner's Bill of Rights"

Oh sure, they look innocent enough...

Lucy and Edie walked into the kitchen today holding hands. Very sweet. They handed me a piece of paper.

Seems they had been conferring with Tim and Nina Zagat and felt that I needed to be reminded of "The Diner’s Bill of Rights". Their version differs slightly from the Zagat version (which you can check out here).

Lucy & Edie’s manifesto, scribbled in pink crayon on green construction paper and cut into our favorite new shape, a triangle, was assembled by a top-ranking group of toddlers and pre-schoolers hell-bent on hammering out some kind of meal time shock and awe campaign. They have asked me to disseminate the manifesto on behalf of your children.

Yes, that's right - your kids attended the Summit as well. Read it and weep:

The Kid Version of "The Diners Bill of Rights"

1. The right to believe that ketchup is a main course.

2. The right to stay seated for less than 5 minutes at the dinner table before you’re overcome by the desire to remove your underpants, place them on your head and run around the table singing “Spoonful of Sugar”.

3. The right to take an otherwise spotless dining room and turn it into a crumb-infested pig trough within 30 seconds of coming to the table.

4. The right to demonstrate that you’re really a thrill-seeking, power-hungry, narcissistic, demi-god disguised as a cute cuddly kid and prove it meal after meal by refusing to eat food unless it is your favorite color or because it has some egregious ingredient like, oh I don't know, sauce, cheese, flecks of green or anything that even vaguely resembles a vegetable.

5. The right to make a gargoyle face and shout “This food is yucky” to the same food you loved three weeks ago for absolutely no apparent reason.

6. The right to discuss the color of your poop just at the moment the guests start to eat.

7. The right to make a horrible face and slowly spit spinach out of your mouth into your mother’s hand if you try it and decide you don’t like it.

8. The right to have perfectly wonderful table manners until Grandma comes to visit and then decide to use your straw to fire peas into her hair as if you were part of some tribe from the Amazon.

9. The right to try to do a somersault at the table and kick the plate into the air with your foot, so that a fork nearly takes out your father’s eye and the food goes flying through the air and there are permanent beet marks on the wall…and still be loved and adored by your parents.

10. The right to go on a hunger strike so long and intense that your parents are convinced you might actually perish, only to wait just before they call the doctor before you gorge yourself at a single meal and save yourself from the throes of death.

Did they miss anything?

YM