Tips for Dining With Your Baby in Public for the First Time

A couple of nights ago we went out to dinner with some friends of ours. Actually, my wife's college roommate had recently gotten married, so we had dinner with her and her husband. My wife and I were a little concerned about this because it was the first time we ever took our baby out to dine in a PUBLIC venue. Even though our baby is fairly "calm" most of the time, it's hard not to feel anxious as new parents about the prospect of taking our 2 month old out to a restaurant. I mean...we've all seen horrible scenes of temper tantrums and screaming babies embarrassing their parents at restaurants, right?

Fortunately for us, our first time turned out to be quite peaceful. Well, our baby did start crying toward the end, but she had been sitting in her stroller for a couple of hours without getting any attention by then...so it was understandable. Prior to the dinner, my wife and I did do a bit of strategizing to minimize the potential risk of the baby being fussy. Here are some of the things we did as well as some other helpful tips for enjoying a night out with the baby!

Go out to an appropriate restaurant. Don't go to a formal style place where every sound your baby makes will be heard by everyone there. Go for the more "child-friendly" restaurants where there is a livelier atmosphere. Not only will these places have the equipment you might need, but the noise level will be higher just in case your baby starts crying. Plus, there will be other kids and babies, so you don't feel singled out.

Scope out the restaurant and ask for a table with plenty of space around it. This is really important when your baby is in a stroller. Depending on how the restaurant is set up, this can be a safety issue if the server has to constantly walker around your baby while holding hot plates of food.

Try to coordinate your dinner time with your baby's meal time. We scheduled our dinner date with our friends so that we could feed out baby just before leaving. Then we had 3-4 hours to spend without our daughter getting hungry. But make sure you still take a bottle of milk or formula, just in case (if you are bottle feeding).

Try to have dinner just a little bit earlier than usual. This will allow you to miss the dinner rush and avoid any long lines waiting for a table.

Take something for your baby to play with. Your baby is going to be sitting there with nothing to do for a couple of hours. After your friends' first few comments about how good your baby is being, the conversation is going to turn to more adult topics. So bring something to occupy the baby for a while.

As our baby girl gets older, I'm sure we'll come across other tips for enjoying dinner out with baby. But for now, we're just glad we got through our first public adventure!