Last Saturday was our eleventh anniversary! Because, somehow, over the years, we have become old. We had a lovely weekend. Dinner with friends on Saturday, a baby playdate Sunday, and then we took babaloo out for a fancy meal at Launderette. We hadn’t done a nice meal out with baby since good friends of ours came into town in February and we took the 11-week-old little to Uchiko, Odd Duck, and Bufalina, where she did swimmingly, sleeping pretty much the whole time at each place while I freaked out that she’d be waking up any second, needing to eat or having a blowout diaper or screaming because of gas pains or or or. When babaloo was born, people told us that the easiest time to take her out to eat would be as a newborn, when she would be happy confined to her baby seat and would likely spend most of her time in the restaurant sleeping. I was incredulous. Getting out of the house at all, even for a walk, was such a huge, uncomfortable production. I was always anxious about timing her feedings so I wouldn’t have to nurse her in public. I also didn’t want to have to change her in a restaurant bathroom where there might or might not be a changing table. And then there was my postpartum anxiety, telling me that some amorphous, terrible thing would happen if we left the house for a meal with the baby. What I didn’t know is that the background hum of a busy restaurant is better than the best white noise machine for getting babies to go to sleep and stay there. It was incredible. She’d pass out within minutes of walking through restaurant doors and not wake up until we were back home (where she’d want to eat every hour, so I’d pay for the leisurely meal with constant feedings for a bit). Now that she’s 6 months old, things have started to change. She was awake through the whole meal and needed entertaining.

Forks are entertaining, right?

And Dadas are definitely entertaining.

Babaloo is in this odd in-between stage where she seems a bit too big to hang out in her carseat while we eat, but she’s till a little small for the restaurant high chairs. She tends to list to the side a bit and slide down over the course of a few minutes. We tried to shore her up a bit with a blanket, but were only moderately successful.

Launderette’s menu included a roasted parsnip dish, which we ordered hoping the parsnip sticks would be long enough to be grasped by a little baby fist. They were, and Babaloo was a fan. She also tried a bit of chicken liver pate with huckleberry and a snow pea with mint and ricotta. Our favorite dishes were the beef tartare (Baby didn’t get any of that just yet) and the dessert, a lemon tart with dehydrated strawberries and a pea ice cream.

Babaloo did really well at this meal. She babbled a lot and tried her voice out some, but the restaurant was loud enough that it didn’t bother anyone. We had a few people stop by our table to tell us how adorable our baby was, which is always welcome. Sure, praise my baby! Do go on. I am all ears when it comes to talk of how awesome my baby is. All in all, success! Next time maybe she can try the raw beef.