Speaking with CafeMom, Stephanie says that the family outing turned sour once she and her children ordered their food and were brusquely reprimanded by the ship’s owner.
Stephanie explains that her children were well-behaved after she had ordered their food. “The children sat nicely — the baby sat nicely — until he saw the [fries].” Unfortunately for little Barney, the fries were too hot. “I couldn’t give them to him,” Stephanie says. “So he cried while I cooled them down.” Nothing so out of the ordinary for any parent who has had to feed a hungry baby before. But according to Stephanie, her child’s tears caused the ship’s owner to snap.
“The cafe owner came over to me and said, ‘You’re going to have to go outside. This isn’t working for me. You’ve got to take that screaming kid out.’”
“And then I thought, OK that’s fine. So I did what he said. Picked up the chips. Picked up the glasses of drink, and we maneuvered the push-chair through a big queue of people,” she explains. “I did it politely. And then we ate our chips and left.”
For Stephanie, the whole incident had been a simple exchange and, according to her, there had been no drama, aside from the owner’s request for her to leave. However, the 30-year-old mom did take the time to write a review on the restaurant’s Facebook page, which is when things really got heated.
The problem, Hunter says, is that Stephanie was on her cell phone and not paying attention to her child. “We’re fairly patient here, being a family place. We let this go on for 10 minutes. Then a queue started forming next to the pram of about 20 people,” he says. “When that queue formed within one foot of the lady’s pram, the baby then went totally ballistic because it was obviously frightened. She continues to operate her mobile phone and does nothing to comfort her child.”
He continues that an elderly couple got up from the cafe and told Hunter’s wife, “‘You should do something about that.’ The noise was absolutely ear-splitting. They were concerned about the baby going completely bonkers.” (That’s a fact that Stephanie disputes in her conversation with us. There was nobody else in the room, except for a group of about 20 foreign exchange students in line for ice cream, she told us.)
“It was so loud people couldn’t hear to order anything at the counter,” Hunter adds. “At that point I went out there and I simply said ’this cannot happen. There’s a family room just through this door with some nice comfy chairs.”
“We’ve got this generation of girls, or women, think it’s OK to push your pram along or leave your kid in the pram and get on your mobile phone. It should be illegal,” he says.
Hunter tells us that in the future, “If I see that happening again, I’m getting straight on to child’s services. I won’t stand for it.”
In fact, the captain placed two signs in his restaurant today:
As well as:
MUMS B MUMS
PLEASE NOT MUMS ON MOBILES
WE ARE NOT CHILDMINDERS."
“There have been loads of people who have come down here to see what a terrible captain I am,” Hunter says. “She spread it all over the country. She has made herself look like a bad mother and increased our business. Now if that was her original intention, good luck ‘cause we’re doing OK. We’ve had loads of children today.”
BABIES LEFT SCREAMING IN PRAMS
CHILD SERVICES MAY BE CALLED IF THE PARENT DOES NOTHING TO CALM."
“Another friend had commented (on the Facebook post) that she’d been [to Cafe Onboard], and [Hunter] told her that she should be bringing up her children better because they were noisy.”
She tells CafeMom that she did comfort her son, cuddling him and taking the time to try to sooth him. “In reality, [his crying] was about two to three minutes,” she says. “I just felt that it was a bit unfair.” She says that she wasn’t on her phone. Instead, she was speaking with her older children who were playing some of the arcade games on the boat.
“I by no means sat on my phone ignoring him,” she adds. And interestingly, Stephanie tells us that “I don’t think he would have challenged me if I was there with my partner.”
And to the owner who kicked her out of his restaurant, Stephanie says that she wishes he would “be a bit more understanding. You can’t help it. Kids cry sometimes. It just happens. You can’t control babies.”
