The other day, we drove miles and miles to go to one of our favorite restaurants, Outback Steakhouse. Hey Outback, what’s the deal with the Outback-free bubble over Chicago? A lot of people live here, you might want to give it a try!

Anyway, we were ordering Evie a kids meal and we decided we might as well order her a milk. We knew she wouldn’t drink it, but it came with the meal, so we thought “might as well”. We have tried since the dawn of time to get that girl to drink milk, she is not interested. Right about the time that she was quitting bottles, we had some success giving her milk in a bottle, but I think that was the bottle nostalgia factor. Other than that, nada. And when I say we tried, I mean it! We started drinking milk ourselves with every meal, we tried calling it different names, we bought fun Elmo cups that could be used only for milk, we even let Evie decorate cups herself with cow stickers. I even remember a string of a couple of nights were Sara and I would “moo” every time we took a drink! She wasn’t having it.

So imagine my surprise when she started going to town on the glass of milk at Outback! Quick to seize the opportunity, I started saying things like, “How is that Outback Milk?” or “Mmm, you really like Outback Milk, don’t you?” Then we went to the store and bought some 2% milk (we have previously tried whole and skim, plus a couple of custom-made varieties involving a mixture of skim and half-and-half). The 2% carton is blue, which we told her indicates Outback Milk. We also dug out a few cups that looked as close as possible to the cup she had at Outback, including some straws.

So far, it seems to be working! She is sucking that stuff down like there’s no tomorrow. I’m sure she will pull her usual stunt and decide tomorrow that she’s totally off the milk again, so I’m holding my breath. Overall though, even if this only goes on for a couple of weeks, I think we did a most excellent job of thinking on our feet and capitalizing on a situation.