Kids at the Japanese Buffet

So we went to the Japanese buffet place for dinner tonight with Mum & Dad, Merv and Debbie. It's 1-for-1 for Nov - and Alex and Gina recommended it, so we went. One problem with Japanese sit on the floor places is that they can't really put baby seats - I wonder how Japanese toddlers are disciplined to sit still, because Nigel and Saffie went crazy! Good thing Celest brought Shanny's seat.

She managed to sit still in her seat (with the help of cheerios) for the entire course of the dinner - almost 2.5 hours. She was probably amused with the adults trying to eat and control the 2 toddlers at the same time, and thinking "soon it'll be my turn to wreck havoc".

The food was alright - but the service was slow and inefficient. Some of the stuff we ordered never showed up - which in the end was good, else we would have exploded. But still, no excuses. The last waitress that served us was ok and apologized on behalf of the other younger ones.

I guess maybe some of the waitresses were afraid of the 2 monsters at our table? Here's a shot of Merv and Celest trying desperately to instill some form of discipline into Nigel and Saffie. When one starts jumping, the other follows. When one starts screaming, the other does it louder. It's a great experiment in kid psychology and adult insanity. However, given all that, I somewhat feel Nigel is getting a bit easier to control each day - at least nowadays you only have to repeat instructions to him 3 times for him to follow :)

On the other side of the ring we have Debbie and the grandparents. What they were trying to do was to pretend to talk to the waitress about the food and ignore the screaming noises coming from the far left. Dad's skills are excellent, you can tell he even got the finger over the lip move perfected to the inch.

The waitress did have a tough time concentrating though - and in the end, none of the food we ordered through her was delivered (see 3rd para).