I took Sophie to the mall the other night.

To be honest, I really didn’t want to. It wasn’t a particularly entertaining errand — one of the nose pieces on her glasses snapped in half and cut her nose before we realized what was going on — and I figured it wouldn’t be much fun to sit around LensCrafters with an antsy, tired 8-year-old. I figured I could dispense quickly with the chore and maybe even have time to pop by Ikea for some (more) storage bins.

But Ray pushed us both out the door. “You’ll have fun!” he said.

I hate love it when he’s right.

It wasn’t a particularly meaningful trip — and yet it was.

The mall was Monday-night-and-it’s-recession-in-a-crappy-part-of-town deserted. I hadn’t been to Fiesta Mall (a great name for what was never a very good shopping center, even at its height) in a while, and most of the businesses, including one major department store, have been shuttered, all under glaring fluorescent light. Depressing. But the clerk at LensCrafters was incredibly nice, as was the young assistant manager at Claire’s, who insisted on giving Sophie a makeup kit for half price when I forbade my kid from buying anything that wasn’t on the clearance shelf (simply because we have a dozen untouched makeup kits already, bought only for the makeup brushes, which also abound at our house). It paid off for Claire’s; guilt motivated the purchase of earrings and hair accessories — which we also don’t need.

But the best part of the mall trip was dinner in the form of some really old Chinese food purchased at Panda Express, enjoyed in the creepy food court (Chick-fil-A is gone, but there’s now a dim sum place selling chicken feet, something I’ve never seen in a food court outside Little Saigon in Orange County).

I was reminded that eating out with your kid — particularly in a deserted food court — can be the best time to catch some quality one-on-one.

My chicken and string bean dish was so inedible that I absentmindedly (because no human should injest Panda Express’ orange chicken, particularly no adult) reached for a bite of Sophie’s orange chicken. Her face lit up. “Let’s share!” she said, bending the cardboard and turning the dish to face me, happily gobbling lo mein and chattering about her day. I sucked down some Diet Pepsi, determined to catch her second wind.

At the end of the meal, I ripped the plastic from each of our fortune cookies.

Sophie’s: SHARE YOUR HAPPINESS WITH OTHERS TODAY

Mine: YOU WILL FIND HIDDEN TREASURE WHERE LEAST EXPECTED