How Does The Baby Affect Going To Restaurants? - Four Month Update

Is it impossible to go restaurants with a baby?

Background

Our normal pattern is to go to a nice(ish) restaurant once a week, and eat fast food on demand throughout the week. We'd heard it's nearly impossible to go out to restaurants with a newborn, but we haven't noticed much of an impact just guessing at it, so my prediction is that we'd see no difference at all with the baby.

Spending Results

 

From the plot at the beginning, it looks like there was a slight reduction, but nothing major. Looking at it a different way, I've plotted the year-over-year numbers since his birth:

Plotted this way, it becomes obvious that we are spending significantly less. To assign a value to it, we're spending ~20% less per month on restaurants since his birth.

In hindsight, seeing the data, I'm not as surprised because while we maintain roughly the same schedule for eating out, we don't go to some of the nicer restaurants we used to visit. For example, going to an all-you-can-eat Brazilian Steakhouse is not as fun if you can't stay for long because the baby needs to nap. Restaurants like that were the most expensive ones we frequented, so that likely explains the drop in spending.

Non-Spending Results

For what it's like to go to restaurants with him...it's actually pretty easy. When we go to sit-down places, we're usually there for long enough that we need to feed him, but you learn pretty quickly to feed him with one hand and eat with the other. He also falls asleep during most of the meals. There have been no instances of him crying for more than the few seconds it takes us to find a pacifier, tickle him, etc.

The only instance of him requiring anything more that I can remember was when we went to Cici's and stayed forever waiting on the stuffed crust pizzas to come out. Carrying him around the restaurant a bit and holding him against my shoulder was enough to keep him happy though.

Conclusion

He has had some affect on our restaurant trips, but so far it's not been huge and I haven't really noticed it outside of the fact that we've gone to slightly less expensive places during our weekly trip to sit-down restaurants. Maybe it will get worse once he starts walking?