An Evening Out...

We recently went out to this great little Ethiopian restaurant in Vancouver called Fassil. (It's rapidly becoming our favourite actually.) We were meeting some people off the forum (great to meet you S!) and also people from the Vancouver group. We had great food and good conversation as usual.

Ayana sat very well, colouring, playing with her little friend T and wandering about a little bit. The great thing about eating at an Ethiopian restaurant here is that the two little ones can just run around and nobody cares. Moses however, took this to a new level on this evening....he was hilarious.

He knows that they adore him in the kitchens. He kept running in there and the staff would cuddle him and laugh, giving him bits of injera every time.

I would run in behind him and they would tell me to leave, that I should just sit and relax, they would watch him.

So, I would go and sit down, only to hear him shrieking with laughter and see him running out of the kitchen holding great rolls of injera that they were feeding him with.

He ran into the area behind the desk and poked at the computer, and the owners daughter would just laugh and play with him.

Two minutes later he would be back in the kitchens, getting more food. Back to the daughter to play. Back to the kitchen. This is all before the food arrived for us!

Here he is at one point, injera in hand behind the bar!

He then started moving chairs out of the kitchen and dragging them through into the restaurant. Of course, I put them back and told him not to touch, but the owners just laughed, "Let him play, he's fine" was all they said.

Basically, he could have done anything and got away with it because the owners thought he was so adorable, I looked like this big meanie trying to set limits!

When the food arrived and he was put in his high chair...he was already almost at bursting point with all the injera he had been fed. (It was a bit of a struggle strapping him into his car seat later...that tummy was very full!)

It just made me laugh to see him having such a fun time and I was more relaxed because the owners were so great with him.

It is impressed upon me every time we go to this restaurant how much the Ethiopian people love children and how very welcoming they are. They hug us when we go in and again when we leave and tell us to come back soon. The owners wife told us to come down on a weekend and hang out with their family.

Whenever there are other (Ethiopian) people in the restaurant, they also laugh with the kids as they run by, wave to them and chat. I never feel as if we are annoying them because our kids make some noise or run back and forth to the bathroom a million times.

What an amazing culture our children come from. We are so dedicated to making sure they grow up very proud of their heritage. After all, it is a great heritage to call one's own.