One of our customers from Massachuetts is moving to our little town in Oregon!  Actually her husband is from here so not quite as random as it sounds.  They are out here finalizing things with his new job and doing a bit of house hunting.  I met her for lunch yesterday.  As we were going to have a 5, 3, 2 & 1/2 year old and an 11 month old we decided to try out the new kids cafe in town.

Mistake.  Plain and simple.

By the time we left it was just so awful it was just funny.  The menu was not exactly enticing and I think diet coke on the menu is a must if you are catering to moms or at least SOMETHING diet!  There was no separate eating area and play area so there was food mushed in with the toys.  The food we ordered took 45 minutes!  You just cannot do that with hungry kids.  Also, her little girl is a very picky eater but loves mac and cheese.  Well, this was no mac and cheese that she recognized (egg noodles, white cheese and parm on top) so she refused to eat it.  Other kids were crawling all over our table, drinking our kids’ drinks and even when asked repeatedly to move kept playing while the waitress was trying to put the food out.  There was a little seesaw in there that was way too big and dangerous for the space (luckily we had just one accident with it).  Alice, who had seemed perfectly fine when we left the house, was a shaking, feverish mess by the time we left.  It was so comical by the end it would actually have been funny to hang a bit longer and see what else could have gone wrong!

So, the final words in my restaurant review: Don’t go.

The kids were supposed to spend the weekend with their former babysitter and her entire family camping at the coast (they have an enormous RV so it wasn’t as if they were going to be hunkering down in a tent in the freezing rainy conditions).  Scott and I had all these lovely visions in our head of what the weekend would hold for us — big bike rides (him), scrapbooking and a trip to the gym (me), going out and actually seeing a movie, and the highlight of the weekend — going to a coffeeshop, hanging out for hours and actually reading the NYT!!!  Yeah, not happening.  Alice has a fever of 103 this morning.  Poor baby is miserable.  Bye-bye blissful weekend!

On a Cocoa Daisy note, we’ve loaded the store with all of the April products if you’d like a peek at the upcoming add-ons!