Special Birthday Lunch

Katie had been talking about having a special birthday lunch for days. We invited Ania and our friend Donna. Katie only wanted to go to the "orange juice place." It's a Japanese restaurant in the neighborhood that we went to one night and Katie got a huge glass of orange juice, so she's been calling it the Orange Juice Place ever since. She loves it and doesn't quite seem to recognize that you can get orange juice at other restaurants in NYC. Of course she also knows the name of many restaurants and when I ordered Pad Thai tonight, she wanted to know if came from Asia Kan (it didn't).

Anyway, lunch was fun. There's something almost decadent about going out for lunch on a weekday. In reality it's a lot easier to go out for lunch because it's cheaper and less crowded (though Sunday brunch in some parts of our neighborhood is often insane). As ladies who lunched yesterday, we had a good time. Donna and Ania finally got to meet and Katie had fun with her kid chopsticks, though one of the shumai ended up on the floor.

The restaurant made a big fuss for her birthday and gave her this cute strawberry ice cream heart. Katie couldn't have been happier. She and Ania then went off to the Children's Museum. We past the CMOM with my mom last Friday and Katie said "That's my museum. That's the children's museum. I like to do circle time there." My mom loved this aspect of her urban granddaughter. Truthfully though, NYC apartments can be so small (at least ours is) that you spend lots of time other places. It's not that different than a suburban kid saying "that's my playground."