San Francisco Dad

Stroller on the Beach (And Other Amateur Dad Mistakes)

The SFBaby family is currently in Canada after having taken an “energetic” red-eye plane trip. Both of the SFParents are here, so this trip is not quite as tiring as the first time when SFDad did the trip solo solo, SFBaby is now more active so it was still a bit of an ordeal—but we’ll write about that later once we’ve had a chance to recover! Canada is still curiously cool for this time of year, so instead, we’ll write about something warmer to cheer up our southern readers:

In January, we were hanging around one weekend with our friend MW. We decided to take a nice leisurely drive over the hill to the coast and we ended up at Ocean Beach. We decided that the weather was nice enough to go for a walk, so we dragged out the stroller and plunked the baby into it. A couple of blocks later, we arrived at the beach sidewalk and we decided that the weather was really that good, so we decided to roll up our pants and take a walk into the sand.

As you may have been able to predict from the title, the only problem with this scenario is that we were dragging along a not-quite-yet-walking baby and an moderate-sized stroller. In the city, anything that is not nailed down tends to get stolen, so in a fit of wisdom, we decided to bring the stroller with us. This was my first amateur dad mistake of the day.

Although it seemed like a good idea at the time, after a few minutes, the fun of bringing a stroller onto the beach started to wear off. Once the sand started getting deeper, we had to practically carry the stroller in order to make any headway. This is definitely the type of mistake that you make only once.

We got halfway down the beach before we got tired. We still wanted to get SFBaby to try out the water, so we ended up abandoning the stroller in the middle of the beach while we made for the tide line. (Although the stroller was still not nailed down, we figured that the quarter-mile of beach was enough of a deterrent for would-be thieves.)

Of course, once we got to the water, we realized that we weren’t really prepared for a beach trip at all. We didn’t have any sand toys, towels, or any of the usual accoutrements. The second amateur dad mistake of the day was assuming that we’d be able to get SFBaby’s feet in the water without her getting wet all over.

I don’t need to say any more about what happened, other than to add that we were glad that we had a spare change of clothing for the little one in our diaper bag!

Tags: amateur dad, beach, canada, mistake, ocean beach, stroller

One Comment

• Grandma and Pa M says:

  May 3 2009 at 10:14 am

  Dear Amateur Dad,
  We are still amateurs in the many ways we approach daily life and problems. Still learning!
  Love, G&GM