Mom About Town: Jenn Cattaui

I’ve decided to do something different for the holidays and offer more than my usual self-absorbed banter (which I still deliver with just as much finesse as I did before I had a kid, thank you very much). I’m setting out to profile a new generation of moms doing cool things in NYC. I hope you enjoy getting to know me and some other mommies this way.

Allow me to take a moment to admit that I’m a novice. However, despite my virgin interviewing skills, I aimed high and contacted my first choice—NYC cool mom and owner of Babesta, Jenn Cattaui. When she replied that she would be delighted, I was happy to have secured my dream guinea pig…ahem, I mean, my first interview.

Mother to soon-to-be-four-year-old Amina and 16 month-old Camille, Jenn’s a Jersey girl who graduated from law school, moved to New York, Paris, then back to New York to take a good job that would allow her to vacation with the best of us—until September 11th changed her perspective. With the help of her husband Aslan, she turned her shopping side gig into something lucrative. Now it’s her business to present the baddest children’s clothes to the public—and by bad I mean the freshest—and by fresh I mean… Well, you know what I mean.

When I ask Jenn what the best thing is about what she does, she replies that it is seeing the customers’ reaction to the clothes and hearing them say they’ve never seen anything like her store before. Then there’s the story of the customer who came looking for the perfect ensemble for her son’s recent portrait sitting. She decided on something by Ed Hardy, the famed tattoo artist design team, and was so pleased with her purchase that she sent a photo back to the store of her son donning the gear rock star style. The framed portrait now graces the walls of the trendy Tribeca store that has Jenn convinced she could stay in New York forever.

And when I ask her about her most prized possession and she mentions a sculpture and plate combination designed by Takashi Murakami and Vik Muniz that she found at a consignment shop in Princeton, I had a feeling I was going to need more than the twenty minutes I had arranged with her. So I delved into asking her the same questions I ask every NYC cool mom.

What’s the best advice anyone has ever given you about being a mother?
Take it as it comes.

What’s the worst advice anyone has ever given you about being a mother?
Put butter on burns. I think I got it from my mother who got it from her mother. It doesn’t work. It makes it feel worse…and get shiny.

What’s your favorite bedtime story?
From Amina’s collection: What Cats Want for Christmas by Kandy Radzinski, Olivia…and the Missing Toy and Olivia Saves the Circus by Ian Falconer, and The Octonauts by Meomi. From Camille’s collection: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton.

What is your favorite children’s song to sing?
You mean besides Party in My Tummy? Little Boxes, the theme song to Weeds.

What parents everywhere can agree on is that Yo! Gabba Gabba’s frenzied kid’s show song is like a manic acid trip (not that many of us would admit to knowing about such things). So I decide that Jenn is just being facetious—until she mentions that she often plays the song in the store. And then I decide that she’s really good at what she does.

What do you think is the most overrated kid’s toy?
Amina really wanted Aqua Dots. Unfortunately, they contained the date rape drug. So they were recalled.

Perhaps since my son is only two, I didn’t know what an Aqua Dot was. But I made a note to add ‘stay updated on all toy recalls’ to the never-ending mommy to-do list.

What’s your favorite place to eat with your kids?
Their uncle’s house. He cooks and he lives three doors down. And The Soda Shop because with two kids, I look for a different kind of restaurant: good food and kid-friendly. It’s an old-fashioned place with nice owners. The kind of place that looks down on cell phones.

There’s a kind-of-place that looks down on cell phones in this city? I make a note to check out the magic time machine immediately.

Where’s your favorite place to travel to with your kids?
When we had Amina, we didn’t change our lifestyle at all. We vacationed in Switzerland, where Aslan is from. But having two completely changes things. It’s much harder. So we’re closer to home now.

Where is your favorite place to play and have fun with your kids?
Hardly a day goes by that we don’t go to the park. The girls like to spend time with my parent’s dog. They want what they can’t have. And anywhere there’s water. Amina’s a water bug and I think Camille will be the same way.

By the way, Jenn is referring to Washington Market Park in Tribeca—a park I happily trooped to the city for several times this summer. The cleverly designed, tactile-rich playground provides hours of age-appropriate fun for the toddler set. And Jenn is already the happy owner of Mr. Brown, Little Blue and Spike, her three cats—which is why the girls cannot have a dog. (She even sponsors a few fowl a year through an animal awareness league in Jersey).

How would you describe your parenting style?
I don’t know if I’m more relaxed or type A. I go between the two extremes.

If you were invisible for one day, who would you spy on?
Salman Rushdie. But I would have to be visible because I don’t know what might be going on. And Oprah. I’d like to see what she’s up to.

Name one NYC mom you would nominate to be interviewed by me?
Jessica Seinfeld.

Is it some cruel joke that she thinks I could interview Jessica Seinfeld? Of course not. That’s just Jenn being good at what she does.

Two hours after walking into Babesta, I walked out with a cramp in my hand but very excited to head around the corner to The Soda Shop for a Cherry Lime Rickey, and off to an electronics store to price a reliable tape recorder.

Because now I know.