A Coffee Shop or a Play Place?

When you have a baby life changes. Almost every aspect of your life changes. In a big way. Even visits to a coffee shop change.

BB (before babies) a coffee shop was a place to relax and read a magazine on a Sunday afternoon; a place to sit in the window and people-watch on Robson Street; a welcome break from the daily grind at the office to chit-chat with a girlfriend. AB (after babies) a coffee shop became a sanctuary for me as a sleep deprived mom. A rookie mom needs her coffee.

But, let’s be honest, we tend to treat them less like coffee shops and more like indoor play places. I remember many trips to coffee shops with friends who didn’t see anything wrong with letting their little ones use the coffee shop stairs as a play zone – every so often scooping them out of the way of tramping feet and evil glares with a sheepish ‘Isn’t she just the cutest?’ grin. Pickle would sit trapped with me at the table, probably wondering why she couldn’t join in, but I don’t have that ‘I love my kid; therefore everyone else must love my kid’ attitude. I still remember the BB days and am well aware that there are those BBers who expect to be able to carry their coffee to a table without tripping over a crawling baby; who need their peace and quiet and a seat that’s not covered in sticky goo.

But I’ll say it again: we rookie moms NEED our coffee. We need the company of adults. We need to meet up with other moms and chat. Coffee shops become an important social gathering place for moms on a rainy or cold day when the park is out of the question. Take it from me – if you’re feeling a bit low, cooped up and craving a bit of company a coffee shop is the perfect place to go. You’re bound to meet someone like my good friend Christine who gathers friends like a rolling snowball and we soon had a fabulous group of girls we could meet with. Chatting with this group, I discovered more truthful and helpful info than I ever did reading the typical baby book (with one obvious exception, of course). We were soon discussing the nitty-gritty facts about how difficult breastfeeding really is and how explosive baby poo can be, sharing tales of vaporized sex drives, and admitting that it’s fairly common to pee your pants at this stage postpartum. Quite often it wasn’t an answer to a problem that brought relief, but simply the knowledge that what was happening to me was normal, and that other moms have been there. It made me feel a whole heap better to have comrades, and, with the chance to laugh about my woes thrown into the bargain, they might well have saved my sanity.

So if we still want to enjoy our coffee, but not receive evil glares from the other customers and for our toddlers to have a better place to play than the coffee-shop stairs, what we need is the ‘family-friendly’ coffee shop. But it’s never easy to find restaurants and coffee shops that are kid friendly. One such coffee shop I recently heard of in Vancouver is the De Dutch Pannekoek House on Cambie and 2^nd Avenue. Being new grandparents themselves, the owners decided to put a kids’ play area in one corner so that moms can enjoy a coffee and a chat while their kids play. This is a great idea – it’s obvious to others that if they would rather be away from kids to sit away from the toys and gives the moms a place to gather.