how to do coffee outings with a baby

I think I have the Mums Who Coffee With Their Babies dialled.

Been meaning to impart this wisdom survival tactic now that I know what I'm doing my baby has started crawling and I can't actually visit coffee shops with him anymore because it's uncharted chaos.

For mothers-to-be, or those simply venturing out to buy a hot drink while carrying a child, this is how it is done. (It mustn't be crawling yet. I don't [yet] know how to do a [dignified] coffee visit if the child is moving. Sorry.)

Put a bib on the child

I've tried to do the whole "oh I'm just giving him five raisins, so he doesn't need a bib" thing before. I've also tried to just casually let him gnaw on an Organix Carrot Finger, thinking the whole rigmarole of pulling out the bibs, wipes, etc negates the relaxed atmosphere of grabbing a quick coffee.

There is always mess, and there is always aftermath.
I've given Sebastian his tea ("supper") while I've tried to casually sip on a flat white. This is so he is distracted for at least 45 seconds and I can then savour the taste of the Ethiopian beans.

If you like it, you shoulda put a bib on it.

Pick your coffee shop according to these three very important things
1) Your buggy must fit through the door without any heaving;
2) Notwithstanding, the cafe should ideally have a spot for you to park your buggy so that it doesn't take up space next to your table;
3)  Most importantly - it must have big tables that are not clustered close to one another.

I've been to coffee shops where there are lots of little tables all packed in together and I have had a bad time.

For one, Sebastian will turn around and try to pick the toast off a stranger's plate. Or knock over their teapot. And the whole session quickly becomes about trying to stop a cascading crescendo of destruction before it starts.

Secondly, other mummy friends have the same problem, so you end up throwing your coffee everywhere, apologising profusely to everyone around you, and not finishing a sentence with the person with whom you're trying to have a conversation with.

You need a big table, not one of those piddly Parisian cafe things. I live in London, and sadly restaurant tables the size of a dinner plate are commonplace. People are stuffed into small corners and are all but sitting on someone else's lap. So if you find a coffee shop or restaurant with wide[r] tables, stick with it.

You see, when you bring a kid to a public area, you bring a lot of crap with you. Wipes, hats, bottles, bibs, spoons, teething toys.
Then you forget that most tables at have a vase on it, salt and pepper shakers, a menu holder. Knives and forks.
You want something big. You need a dumping ground. So go to a place with big tables and lots of space between each one.
Chains are [sadly] usually more 'buggy friendly' than independent coffee shops, at least around Clapham anyway.

Some of the more buggy friendly chains in the UK are All Bar One, Byron Burger, Bill's, Costa Coffee, Nero.

Pay while the going is good

This is really important. It's the difference between being an amateur Mum Who Coffees and a professional. Some places do table service - a delight when the waiter thinks ahead and puts the coffee out of reach of little hands, but is a disaster when they plonk it down in front of the child - but this means you usually only pay right at the end.

Nine times out of ten I leave a coffee shop, my baby has declared he has had enough sitting around and starts to scream a little.
A panic starts to happen, and there's furious hunting through handbags for the right change or waiting for the card to be fucking approved and it's mayhem and disorder as the baby basically has a meltdown on your face.

Or, like one of my mummy friends, the child projectile vomits up her salmon risotto over everything and instead of being able to pick up her bag and run the fuck away, she has sit in her child's vomit waiting for the bill.

So. The moment they serve the coffee and cake, get the bill. Pay it.
If you have to leave in a hurry - which is pretty much always the case -  at least with my baby - you can.

Bring more snacks than is necessary

Ply little hands, and friend's baby's hands, with snacks. Do what you can to get your cuppa Joe. Out in a public place. With another adult human. Snacks are more distracting than toys.

(Even if, like mine, they eat their toys).

Do it in the afternoon

For some reason, there is more time. As your baby starts to drop naps and becomes more active, and then starts to eat and basically become a mini person, you'll find the day stretches out and starts to really lag between their afternoon nap and their bath time.

There are a good few hours there where you'll need to get out of the house and need a change of scene. This usually happens around 3pm, which collides pretty nicely with your dire need for a coffee because you haven't slept the night before and you're completely catatonic.

Morning coffees work well when the child is still sleeping four times a day.

After six months, it's afternoon coffees all the way.

People without children will stare at you

When you're a mum, you get judged. Especially by those who don't have babies. Yours will cry for no reason, or you'll wipe up its vomit with the arm of your coat instead of a muslin, or something will happen in public whereby other mums will look at you knowingly and give you an encouraging, exhausted smile, but others will just passively-aggressively frown at you. Because they somehow think you WANT your child to kick off. 

Learn to ignore and don't even look at these people. Sometimes your baby will start crying for no reason and you won't be able to stop it. It will feel like the whole world is looking at you, and you'll desperately start to sweat and beg your baby to calm down.

Just keep doing what you're doing. Don't even look around you. Your baby is going to drop stuff on the floor, smear stuff all over the high chair, scream loudly because they think it's fun, and cry. And it's going to be loud and messy.

If you care what others think, it'll debilitate you. So just keep on keepin' on.

Your coffee will never be hot

Just a final note. It's a common known fact that mothers never manage to finish (or sometimes even start) a cup of coffee. Because you'll have to attend to five other things the moment you sit down to take that first sip, and sometimes you forget you even made yourself a cup.

Don't worry, you'll get used to cold, or at best, luke warm, coffee. You might even start to not notice.

When I do finish a cup and it's still actually hot, I silently high five myself and get a real feeling of complete and utter satisfaction because I have managed to bust through my last best score.

It's like a little game of Tetris I play with myself to see how far I can get in my cup of coffee.

Try to pwn that shit.

the things you really need when you have a baby

Just before we jet off tomorrow, there are two things I wanted to do:
1) Go for my last Hartbeeps (songs and play group) class (I might cry. I'm naff. I know all the songs off by heart and I sing them everyday.)
2) Write a post about the items I found most valuable during my maternity leave.

I wanted to leave something helpful on the Internet, in the case a pregnant mummy is Googling a list of things she needs to get before her baby is born and happens to come across this.

I got s twins list. The person who gave it to me had twins, so I trusted that everything on there had to be bought. They were 'essentials' not 'nice to haves.' As a result, before they were born, I had 40 muslins, 20 bibs, 8 bath towels. I still have those things, and I obviously haven't used half of them.

If there's one thing I can suggest: literally buy only the essentials. You won't need or use even half the stuff you buy, even if, like me, you thought you were bringing two home. Trust me.

The things I found most valuable, throughout maternity leave, were:

Without a shadow of a doubt, my new highchair.

You get so many types of highchair; some clip onto the side of a table (if space is an issue), some look lovely (beautifully crafted in wood, painted and have a Victorian feel about them), others look cheap and plasticy ugly but work incredibly, while very few look good and actually do the job.

I wish someone had really put emphasis on this for me. If there's one thing you should spend money on; it's a highchair that works. I went for aesthetics - the East Coast white wooden one. A bitch to clean, funny straps that don't work, he would slip through it, wouldn't sit properly, and become distracted so wouldn't eat. Looked nice, but also took up room.

I've eBayed back to where it came from and got myself a Baby Bjorn. It's small, looks better than you think, and the child is locked in.  Easy to clean, no mess anywhere, no distractions, he sits like a regal aristocrat, and he can push blueberries around the tray easily to pick them up.

My only regret? I never did it sooner. I should've got this when he was just learning to sit, as it helps them to sit upright too.

Tommee Tippee milk feeding bibs

Except I use them for any feeding. They have this dribble/milk soft thing at the neck. So nothing gets past it and seeps through.

All other bibs have a gap between the neck and the neckline. If you have a baby you'll know that by the end of the day, things start growing under there. You'll find everything under there, from last week's brocolli to hairballs to milk goo to unthinkable things. It's a catchment zone, and most bibs don't stop shit from getting stuck there.

Except these bad boys.

A few small, ceramic bowls

I found using my Granny's old ceramic bowls from her dinner service, the best thing for all of Sebastian's meals. You can safely heat them up in the microwave (heating plastic is bad....), and it seems to serve just the right amount for lunch, breakfast and dinner. I also store all sorts of finger foods in them in the fridge.

They've been the most useful things in the kitchen, ever.

Muslins

Everyone will tell you to get tons of these. I was told I needed 80 for twins. I bought 40, and as you might imagine, we are overrun with the bastards. This place is one big muslin fortress.

You don't need that many. If you have five big muslin cloths, or ten smallish ones, you'll be just fine.
You'll use wipes and tissues and everything else too.

I bought some cheap cream muslins off eBay.

Dribble bibs

Different from feeding bibs. (I didn't know these kinds of things when I was pregnant. A bib was a bib was a bib.)
My baby dribbles a lot.  He has been teething for, like, eight years. If he doesn't wear a dribble bib/neckerchief, the front of his clothes are wet within minutes.

They're essential. Seriously. I need to change his over a few times a day.

Sheepskin 

Again, a bit of an investment, but it's wonderful and soft for babies and really helps them sleep in their buggy. It keeps them cool in summer, warm in winter, and you don't need to worry about top sheets and lining blankets.

White noise

Buy this app for your phone/a device you're happy to leave near your sleeping baby. Immediately. I have so much to thank this app for. It would help settle my child and help put him back to sleep at all hours of the night, for months on end.

There are a few sounds to choose from, and in the end he liked the sooothing sounds of crashing waves. But the vacuum cleaner, shushing noise and heart beat were favourites for a while. He couldn't get to sleep without it, and honestly, it really helped him realise it was sleepy time.

Car seat to pram brackets/converters

It means you can put your car seat on the pram, for when you travel. It's genius and it makes life so much simpler, especially when you fly.

Just two little plastic thingies that clip onto the frame of the pram.
We could take our car seat away, and simply put it on the pram frame when we needed to push him around. It became known as 'the travel system,' and this is what we are taking to SA too.

Goes without saying...

....the play gym I was given (things hanging off it and music, flashing lights), and the Baby Bjorn bouncer were lifesavers. Before they crawl you can put them in there while you do stuff. My baby screamed for the first two months I put him down, but after that, these two things were brilliant.

Stuff I didn't need:

Swaddling blankets

Muslins wrap them up so much better, tighter and softer. As long as you have a large size muslin, you can swaddle so much better than anything else marketed for 'miracle swaddling.'

Baby bath

Or a top-to-toe bath. I was given a  baby bath, but never used it as I already had a bath seat I could lay Seb on in the bath. I preferred this, as it was less fiddly, and the baby bath seat lasted a long time, until he could sit up.

Excessive cot and moses basket sheets

For some reason, before I had children, I was under the impression that babies regularly shat themselves throughout the night. They do pooh a lot, but they don't soil through five layers of sheets. Every single night. Especially when they are just drinking milk.

I had fuckloads of sheets, ready for two cots and two moses baskets. I have reBayed these too. You only need two for each cot and moses basket.

Scratch mitts

I was also told by a mother whose child scratched the bejeesus out of his face - never seen anything like it since - it was weird -  and told that if I don't buy at least ten pairs of scratch mitts, he will damage his face with his nails.

I cut his nails. That's what I did. So buy a baby nail kit instead. The mitts really aren't worth it.

Bumbo seat

Some babies/mummies love this thing - swear it's the best thing
ever - hmmm....meh. Sebastian didn't love it at all. For one, his legs were a bit fat to fit into it, so it didn't look helluva comfortable. For two, he twisted back, and wouldn't sit upright in it.

Not an essential, I'd say.

Now if only I could take the high chair to South Africa tomorrow....