Lunch date

First off, I just have to mention that a friend has just vaulted to the top of the Scoot and Meh's most-famous friends pile. Look who's rubbing elbows with British royalty at a children's Hanukkah celebration! Alas, it's a small picture, but the woman at the back right of the photo is none other than good friend N. (I think the whole anonymizing of friends in blogs thing makes everyone sound like 007 supporting roles. Now if Q would just set me up with a rocket pack...) Mazal tov, N!

Today our friend I (wow, even more confusing) had graciously volunteered to babysit Zachary during the day so we could have a little lunch date - our first daytime activity away from him. Though our favorite place for proper afternoon tea (ah, a blog entry theme!) was booked solid, we figured we'd stop by anyway and see if they could squeeze us in. We actually ran into friend S and her mom L (honestly, I think we may run out of unique letters in this posting) on their way out, and S as well has spent a great deal of time watching and hanging out with Zachary. Our friends are so amazing, supportive, and caring!

Thankfully, when we got into the tea house, they were indeed able to make room for us to come and enjoy a lovely "afternoon tea" (aka a giant lunch, complete with sorbet, scones, crumpets, quiche, cookies, cupcakes, fruits, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, a giant array of fruits... and, oh yeah, a large pot of tea per person). It was really nice to spend some time alone together and just enjoy a calm and civilised lunch, though we of course occupied much of it talking about Zachary.

Afterwards, we stopped next door at a really fun children's toy shop that we like to check out when we're in the neighborhood. I hadn't realized before that this little boutique is quite the national shopping craze; they had a ton of FedEx packages all piled up inside, ready to be shipped to addresses across the country for holiday gifts. They always have the kinds of fun and appealing wood-carved toys (animals, design-savvy dollhouses as at right, foods [some with Velcro so you can 'cut' them or assemble 'sandwiches'], etc.) that make you believe that yes, wood can still defeat those fancy lead-leaching plastics for pure childhood enjoyment. Everything there is very cute, and of course extremely eco-/sustainability/world-economy conscious; new this time, every object was tagged with attractive labels indicating what combination they were of natural, organic, fairly traded, recycled, responsible, multi-use, etc. Did I mention the store even plants a tree for every $10 you spend there? Anyway, we found an alphabet book we liked that happened to be by a local artist -- because Zachary can certainly never have too many books. Alas, it was only about $9, so no tree was planted. And since it's a board book, its production likely involved clear cutting several acres of the rain forest, so we're still in the extreme carbon negative for the day. Anybody got carbon credits for sale?