one saturday after chinese class, i let the kid choose: lunch at milkwood, or CERES. we’d been to the CERES cafe once before, some months ago, and though the food was quite tasty, i remember it being also quite pricey (as befitting its organic pedigree), and it took a long, loooong time getting to the table. what the kid remembered was that the CERES cafe sat next to a playground. not a regular playground, by any means, none of that ubiquitous modern day kidsafe climbing structures with soft plastic bumpers wrapped around metal tubes in primary hues. oh no.

set amongst the enormous roaming chickens, the vegetable plots, the nursery, the produce market and a yurt display, the CERES playground is organic as its agricultural practice. there’s a treehouse seemingly held together by lengths of thin wire and old bicycle tyres, and there is a massive dinosaur-gourd-shaped thing with spikes and holes that kids can climb on and into, and there is a generous sandpit, and that’s about it.

lunch before playground, i insisted, so we ordered at the counter, and we sat and waited. a short while later, the kid’s iced tea arrived. she lost interest after a couple of sips — it was barely sweetened, certainly nothing like the sugar water you get when buying bottled ice tea — and i gladly inherited it. it was perfectly refreshing, tinged with mint.

and then for the longest time, it was just us and the glass of tea. the cafe is a large, rambling space, with outdoor seating and indoor seating and in-between, undercover seating, but even so, it shouldn’t take this long, should it? upwards of half an hour? just as we began to slump low in our seats, the food came.

i had the tart of the day. it had sounded nice on the blackboard: silverbeet and zucchini tart, and it was just delicious in real life. served warm, it was a golden eggy thing packed with silverbeet (i couldn’t really detect the zucchini), in a light and crusty pastry. the accompanying salad was a textural treat with a variety of toasted seeds scattered through the perfectly dressed leaves.

the kid requested a reprise of the french toast which her dad had had on our first visit, but on her own only managed one of the three enormous slabs of pillowy, syrup-drizzled bread on the plate. just as well i hadn’t sprung for the extra bacon — from memory, close to six dollars for a couple modest slices of happy pig.

and then i sat in the sunny shade for a little bit, digesting, while the kid went off to the playground. the last time we were there, she’d been involved in an altercation with another kid in the big clay dinogourd. the other child — a slightly younger girl — had approached maeve and, unprovoked, started hitting her repeatedly. when maeve eventually retaliated, the other mother, who’d been quietly observing, shot us poison glances and complained, because “well, your daughter didn’t have to hit her back.”

this time, maevis was warned off the treehouse by a boy, who said, “only people who are our friends can come up.” (moments earlier, said boy had been involved in a raucous and ill-humoured to-and-fro with said friends about who got to play with a stick or stone or tyre or something. i forget. clearly his definition of “friends” needs… definition.)

sigh. urban hippies and their free range parenting eh? the kids may eat organic and dress defiantly and ethically second-hand, but gee some of them are turning out to be snotty little turds.