Having gotten a check and giving into my usual urge to have a small celebration upon doing so, I took the boys and gave Al his choice of where to go (within reason -- Will gets to choose next time). The choice? Blue C Sushi. Now, Will does not eat sushi. For one, he doesn't like the taste of seaweed. For two, he's morally opposed to killing fish -- or, in fact, any sea life at all. He will eat fish if he can't tell what it is, but that's tricky and he's aware of it and vaguely disapproving nonetheless.
Still, he agreed, with the caveat that there are things that are neither raw (another huge issue for him) nor fish that were available, and that if he didn't like anything, we'd get him a burger afterwards. So we went to each sushi.
Things I learned from eating sushi with my sons:
1) Alisdair is an expensive sushi date. Granted, it's Blue C so it's all on little plates, and each plate has between 2 and 4 pieces of sushi on it. Still, he ate 5 plates worth himself (1 shrimp nigiri, 2 octopus nigiri, 2 California roll plates plus 1 piece of seared tuna off my plate, plus a piece of my spider roll) AND a cream puff. And he probably could have eaten more if I'd let him. Dude. I had a spider roll and some seared tuna and a cream puff, for comparison.
2) Alisdair is very adventurous in sushi consumption, happily grabbing octopus to try off the belt after getting my stunned okay.
3) Seeing the suckers on a piece of octopus totally freaked Will out, to the point of practically hiding under the table. It was an immediate, visceral reaction, like avoiding a fast ball headed straight at your head. I tried really hard not to laugh, as did the sushi guy assembling things behind the counter. It was pretty damn funny, though. Alisdair did not feel any such compunction, possibly because it was inadvertantly done.
4) Will's getting a lot braver. He tried of his own volition a piece of California roll (after being assured that it was imitation crab and that it was cooked). I didn't ask him to do it, though. He didn't care for the seaweed, and Alisdair was happy to finish it off for him.
5) Little conveyor belts with food on them are FASCINATING to all of us. Nobody could take their eyes off of it all dinner.
6) Octopus can apparently be terribly hard to chew, as Alisdair chewed on his last piece for like ten minutes. This was just desserts for being openly amused by his brother, I guess.
7) I have two rules lawyers for children, as afterward, when Will got his hamburger, I was prevailed upon for ice cream. I sent Al over with money to purchase it with instructions not to go over the amount I'd given him and to bring back the change. He came back with two scoops (2!) and a few cents in change. Then after Will'd finished his dinner he got ice cream. I did the same thing, with the same amount of money, this time with the direction to get only one scoop -- which he did, but only with a waffle cup (which I never let him get) and for which I got a similar amount of change as provided by his brother.
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