Kid friendly cafe culture.

I came across this charming article the other day. I know I shouldn't read the Mail, but if I come across a copy I can't help myself, it's like picking a scab. I began to think about my halcyon days of cafe and kid.

There is no Costa Coffee in my town. The bookshop here is resolutely secondhand, academic and closed till you ring the bell (and GLORIOUS inside,but that's another review), and minus the obligatory coffee pit stop. No Giraffe, no M&S cafe, nothing fancy. So when the kids fancy a mornign out, and I fancy a lunchtime free from cooking, I can no longer pop on a bus and nip to a Waterstones or the like for a ten quid muffin and coffee. When son was a wee one, less than 6 months old, I often took the No 19 to central London and sat in Borders cafe with a huge coffee, staring blankly at passers by and attemting to breastfeed. It was easy then, one baby in a sling, one arm free for sipping latte.

Then along came daughter. Son was 16 months, she was 4 weeks, we attempted a trip to Borders in Cambridge. Ramps too narrow for the buggy, a lift with no floor guidance chart, and a long line of coffee wanters. It's a different story lining up for coffee and muffins when you have a sling, a buggy, and a rampant toddler. No arms free for taking the coffee back to the once was vacant now pinched from under your nose table. Nowhere to park the buggy, having to ask for a key to the changing room for the baby, and tiny wee cramped round tables with pathetic high chairs that couldn't restrain a rag doll let alone boy toddler as was. Severely out of pocket for an expensive coffee that wasn't even finished, as the crowds and hammed in-ness started to get to son and he erupted, leaving all the surrounding couples and singles staring at me, the only glance of sympathy coming from a similarly trapped mother over the other side of the room.

I didn't try to enter Cambridge with them both again until I had a packed lunch, one out of nappies and my husband with me.

So I use our local cafes. They don't offer you papers and muffins for a fiver, and the coffee is not fairtrade, or even, actually, recognisable as coffee, really. But what they do offer me is 5 minutes peace. There are 3 I use regularly, and none of them would win awards for healthy food or coolness, but for a mum of two with little patience they win over trendy cafes any day, and the pocket is pleased too.

Cafe one is the cafe of choice, it resides in DJ's Garden Centre and is called Poppies. Son loves going because not only do they have a fine selection of fountains and implements at the garden centre but the cafe has 2 very good climbing frames and a slide with a den on top. In the sunshine it is nice to sit outside and let them run riot. Food is standard cafe fare, with full breakfasts all day, roasts and the usual omelettes, some pies, fresh fish and poultry, snacks and so on. Desserts are good too, homemade. The kids do have their own menu with the inevitable fishfingers and burgers, but mine usually opt for beans or scrambled egg on toast and a rhubarb crumble. 2 kids and an adult can eat there for under a tenner, drinks included. Coffee is ok, but not fresh. It's table service, there are magazines and papers to read, and the ladies there are more than happy to let the kids wander about. I can waste a morning doing the garden centre and cafe. It only loses out in the bad weather as I can't push the buggy along the verges then. It sits on a busy pathless road and it's a risk to walk on the verges in the mud. It really needs a path leading to it, but then again, everyone seems to drive apart from me. 2 loos, no baby changing. Oh, and the garden centre is great, a full review of that nearer Spring.

Cafe 2 is the Turkish Cafe, "Cafe Delight". Luminous menus and all kids of kebabs sit alongside HUGE all day breakfasts. Again, it's table service and it's friendly. I avoid the breakfasts as the sausages are not of the best quality, but the omlettes, jacket spuds etc are all great, and they also do sarnies, salads and so on. Clientel are usually a range of mums, road and farm workers eating their own bodyweight in lard and the careworkers from down the road. The Turkish waiters are great and very kid friendly, you have to prevent them from giving the kids sweets. Again, cheap, cheerful, bit lardy. You can eat healthily, but only by searching the menu very carefully. 2 loos, no baby changing.

Cafe 3 is the bakery. Called Bonnetts, it offers a few tables and tea and coffee. Coffee is pretty rank, tea is a better bet. Very bad for you sausage rolls (no pig stays that pink after cooking, surely?) etc, and a vast array of cream cakes and fatty things. The little custard tarts are nice, and the almond cakes my preferred treat. Worth a sit down in on a rainy day, as the ladies behind the counter a nice to the kids and you can amuse yourself by guessing just how many cakes the enormously fat woman who just came in will buy. Trust me, there are very many fat people in Chatteris. I know this is not a PC thing to say, but until I moved here I had no idea that some people use mobility scooters just because they can't be arsed to walk. The kids like it here because it's next to the Sally Army charity shop where they can buy tat for 20p, and they also enjoy the sickeningly sweet gingerbread men that don't taste of ginger at all, but it's all quite unhealthy, even by Chatteris standards, and so best left for treats. One loo but no baby changing.

Cafe 4 is the one thats too far to walk, really, so by the time we get there the kids are almost too tired and naughty to eat. It is the Bridge Cafe on the High Street, and the only one with PROPER coffee, Costa brand. It also does the by now fatal fat overdose fry-ups, plus kebabs, pizza, and panini. It says there are salads on the menu but I bet nobody has ever eaten one. The paninis are nice enough and did I mention there is PROPER coffee? Again, table service, cheap, friendly staff, newspapers of the tabloid variety and a rude picture in the loo. No baby changing area, but they are fine about you doing it wherever.

See the Qype page for maps.

Ok, so here in the back of beyond, the food is harder to get healthy-wise, no bran muffins here, but the reception you get is by far and away preferable to the unhelpfulness of most city cafes towards parents of young children. My kids are (generally) well behaved, and like to sit at a table and just be out to eat, but no, they are not quiet and they do on occaision sound crazy. It's important to get kids to mix in public, and important to let me have a coffee. I am willing to let my kids eat a sausage roll of dubious quality once in a while if it means I can get out of the house with them and get some caffeine to boot. In this respect, the small cafe wins every time over the Starbucks (and that's leaving aside all the political and moral reasons not to go there anyway...)

Nature babycare Nappies: green with ease?

Son was out of nappies at 24 months, and boy was I glad of it. Daughter, being only 15 months younger was of course still in them, and so two lots of nappies was making me feel as if i lived in poo and wee. When one wanted changing, the other wasn't far behind, and leaving the houe necessitated lugging a huge nappy bag. I'd initially contemplated changing to cloth nappies after the first few months of son, but didn't get round to it what with one thing or another (being ill, being pregnant again....) So like it or not, the expense of two babies in disposables, not to mention the environmental cost meant that son was de-nappied and trained quickly.


Now daughter is 20 months old and showing signs of wee and poo awareness, i'm thinking of ditching the nappies at last. But before I do, let me review the ones I finally settled on for her. She was never as easy as son, her bottom was more delicate, her skin more easily reddened. Son was happy with a nappy all night with nary a problem, daughter hates being wet and reddens easily if the nappy isn't right. I abandoned the cloth idea, as I mentioned, and fell back onto the cheaper offerings from the supermarkets. I had a guilty moment and felt that i'd let the tree hugging side of me down, but the pressed that guilt away. I had two babies, and one of them was perpetually in a ring sling when she wasn't crying, and the other was wrecking havoc and had learned to run. I wasn't going to be soaking cloth nappies. For a while I Huggied and Pampered, but didn't like either of them. They didn't fit daughters little fat legs well, and I didn't like the darn smell of them, so chemical and horrid. Son must have had a different chemical make up to his wee, either that or it's a boy thing, but he never made his Huggies smell or leak. She did. Eventually, we moved somewhere with a big Co-Op supermarket and huzzah, they stocked Nature Babycare nappies. http://www.naty.com/uk/AboutUs/TheConcept/tabid/71/Default.aspx

The nappies are the brainchild of Marlene Sandberg, who wanted to produce a nappy that was chemical free and as environmentally friendly as a disposable can be. They are chlorine free, biodegradable, and GM free, based on cornstarch rather than chemicals to soak the wee away.

Do they work? Yes. Daughter stays dry, and doesn't come away with that chemical tang in the mornings. Alright, the smell of wee is there, but hey, she wees. There's also none of that weird jelly stuff leakage when full with these, that always freaked me out with son. I'd lob the full nappy downstairs to the bin and it would explode it's wee jelly stuff everywhere. Nice. When full, these nappies just get full, and whilst they might not hold quite as much wee, they hold it in a nicer way. I would say they perform as well, they're just not quite as great if you have to leave a full nappy for a bit, which of course you shouldn't do anyway, but we all know sometimes there isn't a nappy changing area.


Since changing over to them at 5 months, daughter has had no redness, which leads me to conclude that it was the cholrine in the major brands that caused it. I use cholrine free sanitary products because of the same reason. The only quibble is that for daughter they come low on the leg, which since she's been running has meant a little tightness there, but otherwise fit is just as good as other nappies.


Cost? These nappies are not often on special the same way as the majors where you can pick up double the amount of nappies for the same price, so yes, honestly, they are more expensive. They are £5.99 for 34 where I live, so it works out more than a Huggie but cheap in landfill and bottom costs, I think.


These have been a great find for me. I think they fulfill a green consciousness thing for mums like me who just honestly haven't the time for soaking and washing but still want to be landfill aware. They won't appeal to neat-and-tidy-no-smell mums, the sort who just have to have scented wipes and bags, because they don't disguise wee smell as well and don't look as pretty, being un-chlorinated, but they do the job and are reasonably priced. The few times i've been out and fallen short of them, and ended up borrowing a huggy or pamper from someone, daughters redness has come right back, and that for me is the best reason to buy them, ecological considerations set aside.

Cambridgeshire libraries: mums love 'em

Show me a SAHM, and I will show you someone with a superb knowledge of library activities. I am blessed to have lived, with children, in two villages/ towns with friendly, welcoming libraries that give me, as a mother, a chance to feel human, and the kids a chance to charge about with a Nick Sharrett book.

When I only had one child, I lived in Hackney, Central London. I never made it to the library, although I knew it was a good one. When son was 6 months, we moved to Cambridgeshire. It was also around then that we found we had daughter on the way. Our new home was Melbourn Village. Melbourn, in the south of Cambridgeshire, does not have a library full tilt. It has something much better, a library access point (LAP) staffed by approachable men and women of retirable age , who volunteer their services in a terrapin soon to be put out to graze. They open afternoons and are LOVELY to you with wee ones. The kids library there is well stocked, rotated with central library stock, and more importantly, left to the kids. There are games, crayons, jigsaws, and kind staff who talk to your kids and play to allow you to pick out a read for yourself.I could turn up, pass son into the hands of kindly aunt like volunteers who did puzzles, and choose Henning Mankel books for myself. I loved that library.

But we moved, when we had daughter, 1, and son, bit more, to Chatteris, Fenland. Their library is a PROPER library. I was wary of DS and DD running riot and playing, this wasn't the terrapin of ladies they'd been used to. But, this library is great.

A large selection of kids books in a Thomas train, librarians who allow noise, a goodly adult selection and computers to boot. I can let my two climb Thomas for 15 mins while I choose books (I recently asked for chicken keeping books and the librarian was SO great, and chicken obsessed as it turns out). I am able to have the odd quiet moment there, even with 2 under 3, and love it. The non-fiction is well stocked, and, as I find age makes me less willing to read bad fiction, this makes me happy. I may even get round to the local history.

But I go off point. I have two (noisy) kids, one just 3, the other not far behind. Chatteris library welcomes them and me, reassures me about noise, can get me inter library stuff, and at the same time as treating me as an adult, will give me lee-way for the kids ("here's the key for the loo, your wee daughter has gone into the corner....)

Libraries, use them or lose them.

Hello once more.

This blog had been declared dead and defunct, but now it's back. Through a lack of foresight on mine own part, I discovered I was 6 months pregnant with child 2, henceforth known as shouty baby. Energy baby has transformed into energy boy. He is 3, she is, ummm.... 15 months younger. I can't really recommend having two so close as a good idea. It certainly doesn't leave you much time to blog. In my defence, I was still breastfeeding boy and still losing weight from my gargantuan gain during pregnancy even as I was 6 months gone with daughter, so maybe it was a little understandable that I missed the signs. Sort of. Anyway, things are easing up a little now, and after over 3 years of continuous pregnancy and breastfeeding, my boobs are my own again (boy I cannot WAIT to test out new bras...) and they do, sometimes, go to bed on time so I can crack open the blog again.

Anyway, I've also moved house, away from London, and so now have a whole new range of things to review and moan about. I shall endeavour to keep it up this time, without mysteriously falling with number 3.