DADDY CLAY: What could me more relaxing at the end of a long day than sitting down with your family at a restaurant? Pretty much anything…

We’ve all seen that family at the restaurant. Kids are melting down. Sometimes we are that family. But it should always be that way. We want to make sure that an outing at a restaurant stays in the Quality Time category and not cross over into the “things I’m going to talk about with my therapist” category.

We’ve got an idea – the Restaurant Rescue Kit. Let’s dig in to the goodie bag and see what they’ve got.

The most important thing is this book. It’s full of game ideas, activities, fun things, jokes, all kinds of stuff to do with your kids.

In the kit itself, you’ve got this little drawing pad to sketch some ideas. You can draw tic tac toe. Don’t let your kids beat you at tic tac toe or they’ll think you’re stupid.

One of the things we’ve got is this plastic mat. It’s a game in itself. You toss a coin and they have that many bites of food.

You’ve got lots of stickers in here. I heart the interns! You know, an appropriate heart.

Dice, and you know it’s great to see these little baggies being used for a legitimate purpose. My question is, there’s lots of games in there that you can teach the kids to play, my feeling is, why not craps?

More dice in here, these have letters on them. Yeah, and I can’t spell anything with them.

Here’s the thing. You may discover that your kids are stupid when you’re doing this. They may not be able to spell their own names.

These things. These are pipe cleaners and when you’re in college you use them to do maintenance but you can make animals with these and there’s great instructions in the book.

This is clay, modeling clay. If you’re going to use this here’s a tip. Make sure you use it with the mat because this stuff will stick to the table and you only want to do minimal damage to the restaurant.

A pad and pen and of course a great thing full of beads that you can use on the pipe cleaners and of course, crayons! And also toothpicks and you can play pick up sticks.

So you’ve got dozens of different kinds of activities here that you can do with the kids. One mistake you don’t want to make – don’t pull this stuff out all at once. You’re the guy who’s in control of the activities. If you pull the kit out and give it to the kids they’re just going to dump it all out. Most of it’s going to end up on the floor and it’s going to be more trouble that it is without the kit. Dole it out one at a time. You might even think of leaving the kit in the car and only pulling out one or two activities and taking that with you.

Total cost of the kit is about thirty bucks which seems pretty pricey but if you think about it there’s enough activities in here to get you through one meal a month and how much more do you want to eat out with your kids than that? Pick one of these up at RestaurantRescueKits.com.

That’s all for us this week on Quality Time. If you’ve got some ideas on how to spend quality time at a restaurant join us on DadLabs.com.