Lunch with the girlies, and 7 babies!

The friends I made on my NCT course and I get together once a week to do some serious non-stop baby talking.  It’s been great meeting people who are going through the same things as you are at the same time.  It’s been so great to see all the little ones developing together and for us Mum’s to get out and chat.  It’s our first night out next week without the babies (the Dad’s have been doing that for months but it’s taken us a little longer to get organised!).

Anyway our problem with our lunchtime get togethers is where to go that is big enough to cope with 7 pushchairs, we have moved on from prams now – we are getting so grown up!  At first we tried Starbucks in the Glades but even the chairs outside couldn’t really be arranged to take all of us.  Then we moved on to Patisserie Valerie which was pretty good for space out by the escalators but you couldn’t guarantee getting those seats so if we didn’t the we would all end up sitting at different tables so not ideal.  Then we found the most ideal place, The Ivory Lounge just down the road next to TK Maxx.  It’s great – very baby friendly and loads of room.  The waitresses are great, they move chairs and tables to get us in and serve drinks as well as food at the table so we don’t need to get up.  There is a large disabled toilet downstairs which has a changing table in so we were sorted!   They even gave us some discount cards so we get 20% off out food and drink bill – excellent!  Also as we were all breast feeding the beverage of choice was lime and soda which cost something like 25p – fab!

We have tried a couple of other places since just for a change, The Tom Foolery near the cinema was nice but we didn’t feel had enough space for the buggies and there was no changing table in the toilet so we had to change them on the floor – not ideal.  In the summer we went to The Crown in Sundridge Park, the food was great and it was lovely having all the space in the garden – the only problem was there are a few steps to get in and out of the pub but they did have changing facilities.  We also went to The Crown at Leaves Green, they are very baby friendly and gave us a whole section so we had all the room we needed.   They also have a lovely garden in the summer which is great for kids.