some days, once a week, say, it is good in clement weather, to strap the kid in the baby bjorn, get on the bus and head into the city. timing it just right, directly after a feed and a nappy change, will buy us a two-hour excursion, plenty of time for a stroll through the aisles of department stores looking at what i like to call “things”, and then a quick whirl through the david jones food hall for lunch and/or a treat. maevis would have fallen asleep sometime during the bus trip or the subsequent wandering, and on the bus home is when the first gruntings of awakening emerge. perfect.

a week ago, such an excursion resulted in a turkey and brie baquette, three nudie smoothies, a tub of chocolate mousse, and a $20 box of the special christmas assortment of lindt gingerbread truffles. today was a much more modest affair, yielding a small tub of roasted tomato couscous and turtle bean salad from the salad bar. en route to the bus though, i did stop by starbucks, the one which opened up in the space where half the commonwealth bank’s counters used to be. remember, nellie, when we walked across the brooklyn bridge in the windchill, and my face broke out in hives, and on reaching manhattan we had to take shelter in a starbucks for gingerbread lattes? today there was no such need, even though i really wanted to, for christmas. instead i went the maccha frappacino, in a lovely shade of green. in a very non-christmassy display of meanness, starbucks now charges 30c extra if you say “yes” when they ask, “and do you want whipped cream on that?”.

humph.

ah these heady days of carefree consumption of pregnancy danger foods. i was hardly strict about it over the gestation — a couple bits of sushi here, a runny egg yolk there, with no ill effect except mild worry if my stomach flip-flopped after the fact — but in the last couple of weeks i’ve gleefully eaten two brie sandwiches, two chocolate mousses (with a newly acquired third in the fridge), an enormous amount of sashimi at one sitting, and today’s whipped cream on my frappacino. all i have to tackle now is soft serve ice cream.