Why you should always listen to your children (a lesson in parenting)

Lester's friends Stan and Nicole came to Baltimore this weekend so Nicole could interview at a hospital nearby.

Saturday night, we hung out with them and my sister and her husband (and Matty!!) at a Food Truck Rally in the kitschy Hampden neighborhood. We felt bad that they might think the best we Baltimoreans could do was beer and fried food from a truck. So we went out to a real dinner on Sunday night.

(OK -- that's not really true. We were at the mall buying the kids new shoes [why do kids' feet grow so darn fast?] and they met us at Stride Rite, and we were all hungry so we went to Cheesecake Factory.)

Being infrequent restaurant-goers, we totally forgot that people like to go out to eat on Sundays, so we were shocked when the hostess told us it'd be a 45-minute wait. But we braved it anyway.

55 minutes later, we checked on our table. "10 more minutes," she said brightly.

Fifteen minutes after that, I started to really get impatient. The boys were starving, Clair was restless. It was cold in the waiting area. Where was our table??

The boys were more anxious about the buzzer we were given. They'd been waiting patiently for it to buzz and light up, which we told them would happen when our table was ready. Every other second or so, they checked it. "Mommy, it's not buzzing!" "Mommy, when is it going to buzz?!"

So when we checked our watches that final time, and voiced our impatience, Cary said, "Let me check the timer."

Then he ambled over to a blank wall, and pretended to press buttons. "The timer says 'Two more minutes!'" he declared, holding three fingers in the air.

Dean looked at the buzzer and turned it around and around, inspecting it.

"Maybe the battery ran out," he said.

"That's a good observation!" I said to him, sorta automatically. "Maybe it did."

But then I started thinking about it. Maybe there was something wrong with the buzzer.

So I went back into the restaurant to inquire about our table.

"You have pager 75?" the hostess asked, bewildered. "That's weird. We've been paging you."

She took the pager from me and looked at it, much the same way Dean had peered at it a few minutes before.

"I'm so glad you came in," she said. "This pager isn't working."

It's at that moment that I realized my children are geniuses and should never be ignored.

The battery was bad on the buzzer -- just like Dean said. And we did get our table two minutes after Cary told us we would.

For their amazingness, we let the boy wonders order whatever they wanted.

Cary ordered chocolate cake. Dean got vanilla ice cream. We let them stuff themselves silly, and even gave Clair some whipped cream, just for being related to the two smartest boys in the world.