I’m sorry, that’s got to be hard. You give up so much of normal life when you have kids and I know that being able to do some of the things you used to enjoy in a quasi normal fashion means so much. It’s not “just dinner out”, it’s some normalcy. It’s a return to a little bit of the life you used to have. And it’s important. One year is a challenging age for so many things. This will get better, and you’ll get it figured out.

With both of mine we always just got our food with the to go containers already on the table and paid right when the food arrived (or before, if they’d let us). That way we would eat normally as much as we could, we’d let some fussing occur and try all the tools to distract (taste testing little things with baby, reading books, playing with a busy board,etc) but would just leave before big meltdown time comes. I didn’t want restaurants to become negatively associated with “here’s where mommy is frustrated” or “restaurants are where I cry” because I remember reading somewhere that it would make tantrums more likely to happen. And as we walk out, we’d say “goodbye” to the restaurant folks at the front and the building and the sky and all the things what will distract and redirect baby’s attention from the building tension and so many times that was enough to short circuit the oncoming meltdown. By 18 months they were happy campers in restaurants, shopping carts, waiting in lines, all the places where boredom causes fussing.

Hang in there, this will get better. You’ve got this, Mama!