The Continuing Adventures of the Littlest Virgo

I don’t really care to turn this blog into any kind of shill-fest for products and/or services, but the fact remains that I am exactly the kind of American consumerist you would rightly expect a person of my socioeconomic background and present situation to be. I like to be entertained; I enjoy a few independent works of art but spend most of my time on mass-produced media. I like to eat; home cooking suits me just fine but I shop at recognizably large grocery stores and also frequently dine at transnational franchises. That is how I roll, and it would be pointlessly disingenuous to assert otherwise. So I’m just going to go ahead and assume that you all have heard that there is this place called Dunkin’ Donuts, and that they serve breakfast-type foodstuffs. And I am going to go ahead and tell you a story that happens to take place at a DD, and simply hope that you understand I am not trying to do any kind of stealth viral marketing for the Dunkin’ Brands Corporation.

Usually we get our Dunkin’ Donuts bagel sandwich combos to go and enjoy them at home on a lazy weekend morning, but this past Saturday found my wife and the little guy and myself out and about quite early and relatively far from our neck of the woods at the breakfast hour, so we stopped in at a DD for the dine-in experience. Of course the little guy had already started a banana roughly the size of his femur at home and finished it in the car, but we still managed to split up two breakfast combos into what I like to think of as Three Little Bears portions: I of course had a bagel sandwich and side order of hash browns and coffee all to myself, my wife had a bagel sandwich and coffee, and the little guy had her hash browns (which are really more like round, flattened tater tots than anything, but whatever, semantics) . Everyone was pretty pleased with that arrangement of food distribution.


The little guy is at a bit of an in-between point these days as far as mealtime seating arrangements go. His high chair still sits in a corner of the kitchen, although my wife and I never try to maneuver him into it ourselves. Sometimes, though, he specifically requests it, and he still (barely) fits, so we generally oblige him. He also has a booster seat semi-permanently strapped to one of the chairs of our dining set, and that’s the spot where he eats most of his meals at home, particularly when we actually make a point of all three of us sitting down together for family dinner. The third option is the just-his-size table and chairs in the playroom – which has somehow been christened the “snack table” – where the little guy is allowed to eat solo lunches if he’s not in the mood for the booster seat and his parents are not in the mood to argue with him.

Of course in an unfamiliar fast food place all bets are off, and if it even crossed my wife’s mind to ask for a high chair at Dunkin’ Donuts, she kept it to herself; I know it never crossed mine. The little guy just sat in a regular chair like the rest of us, seeming perfectly content to be eye-level with his little bag of potato-discs.

But more than the predictably hyper-palatable food itself, or even the sitting in a big boy chair itself, I think mostly the little guy enjoyed the freedom of not being strapped in. He quickly settled into the following process:

1. Eat a single hash brown.
2. Pick up a napkin from the pile in the middle of the table, and wad it up into a ball (incidental wiping of hash brown grease from fingers may or may not ensue)
3. Slide down from chair to floor unassisted
4. Walk over to garbage and throw away used napkin
5. Return to chair and climb back into it unassisted
6. Go to Step 1

So over the course of a bag of hash browns he must have gone through that entire cycle about eight or nine times. I really did not think I would ever have much use in my life for a phrase like “adorably fastidious” but then my son came along and started having a personality, and now it seems like I can’t get through a day without saying that.

Also did I mention that this DD was actually inside a gas station? I feel that is relevant because I must also inform you that after breakfast we bought a bandana for the little guy which was patterned with John Deere logos and pictures of tractors. He let us tie it around his head do-rag style and he thought he looked pretty cool in it. He was totally right, too.