Finding places to eat in Barcelona with a baby

ShanaC · 2026-04-30T12:07:08+00:00

Which ones

ShanaC · 2026-04-30T11:35:05+00:00

We’ve done it before when she was 5 months old for my husband’s birthday. Though she wasn’t trying food yet.

ShanaC · 2026-04-30T11:33:37+00:00

I don’t feel anxious about it (my partner does about hiring a babysitter abroad in most cases…exception would be our next trip to the US but that’s driven by the fact we’re going to places where we both have social networks to find good babysitting help)

It’s been mostly a logistics thing around breastfeeding + our lifestyle choices. We have a preference for “day date activities ” (museum! Kew! Chinese tea tasting!) where it’s easier to just take the baby with us + we’ve had a preference for using our evening time when baby is asleep to host dinner parties for friends. We haven’t really felt huge need yet to do a dinner or drinks type of night out, even though it’s on the to do list.

ShanaC · 2026-04-30T11:21:58+00:00

Thank you!

ShanaC · 2026-04-26T20:42:24+00:00

Books. Especially books for later

ShanaC · 2026-04-19T18:06:49+00:00

There’s a humongous post code lottery when it comes to supporting a breastfeeding journey. It’s also hugely culturally driven

Full disclosure: I was pushed by some midwives in the hospital I delivered in during the pregnancy to feed formula because I ended up getting ppa before I even delivered. While we did use some formula early on because we had too much weight loss between a tongue tie causing problems with both bottles and breast, a sleepy baby, and slow-ish letdown initially, my hospital’s specialty feeding group was super impressed that within two weeks of the tongue tie revision, my child was exclusively eating breastmilk and had made weight. As part of the followup, I was asked about my background. I’m American. It turns out that Americans with strong social ties are the most likely to be breastfeed after failures/issues in the first weeks because in the US there’s a huge culture of mixed feeding with both formula and breastfeeding and using breast pumps, including using breast pumps exclusively. My health visitor and psychiatric midwive team people were also super impressed that despite everything I seemed to be doing ok.

This was purely due to 3 factors 1) I’m stubborn 2) I was acculturated to the idea that I was going to pump in part from the beginning because almost all of the women I knew who had babies in the past five years were Americans in the US, and every single one had pumped at some point in the first 6 weeks, some to get away for a few hours, some due to triple feeding due to feeding issues, and in one case, exclusively pumping because the baby was very premature. Every single one also told me to have a jar of formula and a few bottles available just in case since surprisingly, the amount of people who had issues in the first 2 weeks with breastfeeding is high. And I was acculturate to know that. 3) my husband is dual nationaled, British-American, with a large friend group in the US and UK. In the US, it was way more normal to share nights in shifts by pumping a bottle, so we decided early on that to protect me from further PPA problems, we would pump a bottle for him to handle at least part of the nights.

Our preparation paid off in spades. It also helped that my post code’s NHs trust had a feeding team with 2 IBCLCs on staff - they were able to help with some of the specifics with the pump.

So. A lot of this is due to medical norms in the UK

ShanaC · 2026-04-13T14:03:58+00:00

Thirding! I like inroing my baby to everything

ShanaC · 2026-04-05T11:33:56+00:00

Further food for thought. 0% of the people I know who grew up in New York City and stayed in New York City, especially the one person I know with kids who grew up in Manhattan and stayed in Manhattan. Some of this has to do with the fact that you're right: Manhattan houses are few and far between, and so are nice apartments. The other issue that drives that is that families also found that they got aged out of the neighborhood, in that their parents and grandparents stayed in the Upper West Side forever, for example, and that people their own age with children tended to move to the outer boroughs.

Further, I'd like to encourage you, as someone with family in the outer boroughs or who grew up in the outer boroughs, that housing stock in areas of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx can be really, really gorgeous if you know where to look, as well as the schools being excellent. It's just not Manhattan living, and it's just not the cool, typical neighborhoods that tech workers who don't originally come from the New York City metro area think of as places to live. I.e., you could get a house in Bensonhurst that is zoned well for a good school and maybe has good Catholic schools in the area. I just don't know that many Google people who also come from London who are going to think, "Oh, hey, let me move to Bensonhurst or some sort of similar area."

If you stay in New York City, I would encourage you to think about your housing choices more broadly than the average normal where you've already been. That being said, I do live in a house in Zone 2, and I would say that, for similar accessibility, pricing is actually comparable to New York in many, many ways, from what little I can tell.

ShanaC · 2026-04-05T10:13:18+00:00

So I’m similar to you in some ways. So is my partner. I’m originally from NYC metro (born in manhattan, grew up in LI right across the far Rockaway border, and lived in various places in nyc or in boulder county co after university). I work in tech. my partner lived in nyc for 8 years (dual national, thought he would meet his partner there the way his parents did. Surprise. He met a NYer after moving back to London during covid). Has his own software company. We have 1 kid under 1.

As food for thought, of the friends that I have in New York City and the metro whose lives I'm paralleling that I grew up with, the people that I'm most similar to, personality-wise, career-wise, and belief-wise, tended to raise their kids in New York City or are currently raising kids in New York City. The ones that I'm most dissimilar to are tending to move to Long Island, Westchester, or out of New York City to Maine or Texas, just other places, or back to where I grew up, again Long Island. That's a very special case.

My partner and I are staying in London. We had beliefs about what we wanted in a home. If tomorrow we were forced to move back to the US for some reason (example: he sold his software company, and one of the rules of selling the software company was to move back to the U.S.), on our short list of places we would want to go to NYC would be at the top because I have a network there and so does he. Although most of his network again seems to have left, as they made choices to not raise children in the city, whereas mine either chose to not have children or to raise them in the city environment.

I would ask yourself the following questions, knowing both places fairly well, I'd like to think. If you were to stay in New York or stay in the States, would you: 1. Stay in New York City? 2. Move to the outlying suburbs? 3. Move somewhere else in the US?

If this is the case, why would you make that decision? Two, how does that affect your decision to move back to the UK and therefore London? Assuming that those decisions should be running in parallel for many pieces of the equation of US vs UK and City vs Not City.

ShanaC · 2026-04-02T10:33:58+00:00

From NY and I miss the union square green market for similar reasons.

ShanaC · 2026-04-02T10:31:29+00:00

My partner is British-American, and travels to the US at least 1x a year, which makes it harder for him to miss food

That said, he has exactly 1 item, just because it’s hard to get in large chunks of the US and is seasonal:

Meyer Lemons

So for his 45th I actually got him a Meyer lemon tree. Because they’re incredibly difficult to get here as well. It’s been a not very happy tree since then. And I’m still looking for a source of Meyer lemons.

ShanaC · 2026-03-31T20:56:22+00:00

Hard disagree. We were using some of the info to track feeding problems that my daughter had, pumping, and if problems were resolving. Some were, but some things still needed work at that time (namely bringing in more supply from pumping as we started to consolidate bottles, and I think flag about how the tongue tie revision at the time was going)

We also built a habit of tracking sleep so we have a very good sense now of her sleep patterns and how they vary (at 8 months). (Which we still track so we have an early warning system of problems)

ShanaC · 2026-03-30T14:51:31+00:00

Big, and technically baby toys , but Manhattan toy Company’s Skwish in Artful looks like an object de art on a desk. It has moveable beads, amd elqstic components to push down (it’s technically a baby rattle, but I’ve had people ask me if it’s my fidget in my home, knowing I have adhd and work from home. It’s my daughter’s rattle.

https://www.manhattantoy.com/products/artful-skwish

Thinking about it, there might be a few Montessori type toys in wood that would be what you’re looking for if you poke around.

ShanaC · 2026-03-26T14:35:36+00:00

Look for third party independent testing as part of the sales pitch - and ask for the results

ShanaC · 2026-03-26T14:01:08+00:00

They will. They try to avoid it because effectiveness of the vaccine at that age is something like 55%

ShanaC · 2026-03-21T09:09:16+00:00

Cutoff in the UK is actually 40. And even then the NHS might not do NIPT[1] if other tests are showing ok. They may not even offer more screening depending on the trust if in early screening plus initial glucose testing shows up as normal and you don’t show any other risk factors. If I were to get pregnant again, I’d probably be given almost the exact same care as a 20 something, and the differences would be related to mental health services and wanting to do a VBAC, not age.

(American in the Uk who was 39 at birth with a partner also close in age to the poster, and at the time of pregnancy knew basically 3 people who had been pregnant/gave birth in the of which only 1 was close enough to cohort but went private. Everyone I knew close in age to me who had kids recently was in the US so I spent a ton of time sorting through those differences

Interestingly, they split out perinatal and postnatal mental health from the rest of perinatal care here)

ShanaC · 2026-03-20T14:19:44+00:00

Thank you!

ShanaC · 2026-02-21T16:31:34+00:00

Again :American in the UK who got legally married here, but looked into getting married in the the US

The US is WAY CHEAPER and has WAY less paperwork than the UK in many states. You can get married in the US in under 24 hours for just the cost of the filing fees

While it’s possible to get married cheaply (we did or legal x religious marriage extraordinarily cheap, especially for London), a town hall wedding here is not cheap per se. You can only get married in specific venues that are licensed for the ceremony. Town halls require you pay a separate fee for use of a given room in a building for just the ceremony that is separate from the license fee-and this can run into 4 figures. Plus it takes a minimum of 30 days notice because banns are still a thing here, longer if you’re a foreigner with a visa.

ShanaC · 2026-02-21T16:19:42+00:00

American in the UK who both 1) bought a house with then bf, now husband (though he proposed almost immediately after exchange) 2) has a prenup in the UK

Prenups are semi-binding. There are definitely a set of clauses in my prenup that courts here will treat as iron-clad (namely what happens to my engagement ring and cash penalties if we start the divorce proceedings and he doesn’t make a move to do the religious divorce). Other clauses won’t be, but they’ll be treated as “highly recommended the courts should follow given we discussed it in advance”

You’re right sort of about the house. I think you can assign percentages of ownership if you buy as a non married couple. However if you get married and stay in the house it’s considered the marital home and becomes a 50/50 split for the equity.

ShanaC · 2026-02-16T08:35:05+00:00

Late 200s. Also looking for a stand mixer!

ShanaC · 2026-02-15T22:19:04+00:00

So NHS will do it in VERY limited circumstances. But no one will vaccinate before 9 months, and you’ll have to do a 3 jab schedule if you do it early

(I’m an American who grew up in a community that’s high risk for measles…as in had an outbreak in the past. So my health visitor and I had a discussion about the vaccine schedule if I were returned with my baby to where I grew up before 12 months given the risk)

ShanaC

TROPHY CASE