a much awaited dinner date with a girlyfriend has come and gone. now that it’s gone, i bet you wanna know how it went…
darla did these things in this particular order: threw a fit in the ordering line. spilled her entire cup of edamame on the floor. stood on her chair repeatedly. ran out the front door that was propped open for the gorgeous fall night. pinched a baby on the cheek. poked a complete stranger in the REAR END with a chopstick! attached herself to one of the lady waitstaff and kept running after her complete with the leg cling (another total stranger, mind you. i just know she’s gonna climb in the back of a van someday when offered a sucker). repeatedly slid down the back of the booth bench seating. refused to wear her shoes at the table. stole carly’s tortilla chips. probably only ate a combined total of 5 bites as dinner and, drum roll, yelled HEY STOP YOU STUPID JERK at an oncoming car while we said our goodbyes on the sidewalk outside the restaurant.
(by the way i am chuckling heartily at the memory of this last one as i type.)
BUT
they poured me the wrong kind of wine at dinner so they gave me two for the price of one. those glasses look half full and not half empty to me! soooooo….that makes the evening a success in my book. CHEERS!
also, at bedtime she told me she likes me and i’m a fun mom. she has some redeeming qualities. thank you, darla, for keeping my life interesting. as infuriating as your antics can be at times, it’s your spiciness that i love the most about your personality.
momjeanz 
I almost spit out my coffee reading that list. Love you guys!
it was a case in hilariousness. i did want to make clear that she did not learn the stupid jerk part from me. at least not entirely. we got a studio ghibli movie last week called the cat returns in which a truck almost runs over a cat. a teenage girl shouts “watch it you stupid jerk” at the truck. darla has been copycatting (pun! cat pun!) this in parking lots, garages, on the street, etc. it is more funny than embarrassing.
I just read this to your dad and there are tears coming out my eyes I laughed so hard. And I remembered that you tried to pinch a guy’s buttocks in the Mooresville BMV back in the day when you were a Darla prototype (and you were dramatically offended by me smacking your hand down just as it made contact with the edge of his jacket). I think that was the same evening that you kept crashing the little kids carts they had in Kroger into stuff on purpose and wrecked a whole display of cooking oil (used to be in glass bottles) and then shrieked so loudly “you are hurting me!” when I took your chin in my hand to make you look me in the eye that people came running to see what sort of torture I was inflicting on YOU. It wasn’t much later that you picked up the line from Adventures in Babysitting from the subway knife scene and repeated it at a family holiday gathering inserting YOUR name for the babysitter.(Uncle Mark’s brother Scott was the only adult to hear it other than me and the other kids didn’t notice.) I think we just stopped going out to eat for several years after you crawled out of your seat onto our pizza at Mr. Gatti’s in Martinsville………