"It's not your birthday!"

In planning for Zelda's birthday dinner Saturday afternoon, she codependently considered the children as she weighed her choices.

Lovett, as I've chronicled before, is a notoriously picky eater. Painfully picky. "Why don't you wait in the car while we go in and eat?" picky. Dora is not so picky, she's just opinionated. She knows what she likes and where to get it.

Zelda narrowed it down to three choices:

1. [local Italian bistro with the patio view of the traffic headache that is Highway 280]
2. [local seafood restaurant with the kicking catfish tenders]
3. [internationally-famous local rib joint]

Early polls indicated a preference for [seafood], as Zelda had a craving for coconut shrimp. Lovett was excited by this prospect, since he likes the chicken fingers there, though I tell him they fry them in fish grease.

[Aside: Are chicken fingers a product of poultry genetic engineering or something? When I was a child, chickens didn't have fingers. Or lips, either.]

Dora protested because seafood is on her short-list of won't-eats.

Then Zelda leaned toward [ribs], which got Dora's and my attention. Yeah, a thick slab of juicy ribs with vinegary red sauce, tea sweet enough to give a zombie the shakes, and a pint of banana pudding to top it off (eat your heart out, Doug). Dora's chant of "Ribs, ribs, ribs!" was overshadowed only by barfing sounds from Lovett, who, it pains me deeply to report, "doesn't like bbq." The last time we ate at [ribs], he dodged flying sauce from my fingers while picking the onions out of a pint of potato salad with a spork, no less. Zelda responded to his protests with a hearty "it's not your birthday!" but the gagging didn't stop.

Then Zelda mentioned [Italian], home of the piping garlic rolls and gnarly eggplant (!) parmesan, and the more she thought of Dora protesting seafood and Lovett eating melba toast and Sweet'nLow at [ribs], she decided that [Italian] was the way to go.

Which broke Dora's heart. She lay face down on the ottoman and wailed, "I want to go to [ribs]!" She was inconsolable. "It's not your birthday!" Zelda reasoned, but the wailing only got louder. I felt like crying, too, because I realized that [ribs] was now out of the question. Going to [ribs] after an outburst like that would concede all sorts of parental power to a pugnacious five-year-old, and bad as I could taste that sauce hours later in my goatee, I knew it was not to be.

So we ended up at [Italian]. Zelda had a tasty loaded calzone, I had (what else) eggplant parmesan, Dora had spaghetti and meatballs, and Lovett had a cheese calzone (the Italian counterpart to the cheese quesidillas he orders when we go to [local Mexican dive with the hottest salsa on the planet and tea sweet enough to rival that at [ribs]]).

"I have an idea," said Lovett. "After we're done here, can we go ..."

"It's not your birthday!" said Zelda and I, at the same time, as Dora dropped a fully-loaded 7-Up onto the patio floor.