Beach Trips Part 1: An Everyday Epic
Tell me this: if you saw two women cack-handedly setting up two pushchairs, with two hot and crying babies, and a gazillion bags, would you park in the parking space that they are unloading all of this in, or would you park in the many free spaces precisely on the other side of their car?!?
Apparently if you are the people we saw that day, you wait to park in the one the pushchairs are in, with bags strewn across the floor as we tried to eject all of our belongings in the quickest way possible. People are bizarre.
Anyway, this was the scene as my sister and I, with our two little girlies, attempted our first beach trip together.
At the start of the summer holidays (or just that week of ‘summer’ in fact?) we thought we’d brave said beach trip with babies, but decided we needed to go somewhere that was going to have shaded areas. We picked Appley on the premise that even if there wasn’t much shade on the sand, we could do lunch with the babies in the wooded area undercover. Well.. the babies were apparently less excited about the beach trip as they both cried – quite a lot- most of the journey there (I suppose they don’t really like being strapped into sticky stuffy car seats on the hottest day of the year so far?!) This was altogether rather stressful for me and my sis, so when we saw the sea we basically planted the car in the first space we saw and retrieved the now snot-masked madams from the car to calm them with cuddles.
However, after a moment to all calm down we realised we had forgotten we were aiming for Appley and had parked in Ryde instead (if you don’t live on the Island, this is not a tragedy; they’re basically the same place but Appley is like the fancier beach much further down. Appley has an actual little Castle. Ryde has a pub called 'The Castle.' That's the difference.)
What was quite tragic about the situation was we couldn’t face the idea of putting them back in the car again, so opted that we’d find a way to ‘make shade’ where there clearly was none at this end of the super long Beach.
As we headed along the promenade we found a spot and steered the pushchairs off the concrete towards the sand. However, we must have shown our parent naivety when we both pushed the pushchairs onto the sand, only to get stuck immediately! Duh! What were we thinking?! It must’ve looked like we were attempting to burst onto a faulty Platform 2 and ¾...
So we carried the pushchairs across the sand and I volunteered to make shade for the babies by draping one of our blankets across the two prams to create a shield effect. What I learned that day was that if the sun is very high in the sky, shadows don’t really form, and with one baby on the move this slither of shade was definitely not going to work, however much factor 50 I'd lathered her in! She was actually so smothered in sun cream that she looked severely unwell.
My sister, the solver of problems, then spotted a ‘pop up beach tent’ for sale at the shop so went and bought it. Brilliant! It was all going to go smoothly now...
...Until she emptied the box to find a bundle of poles and had to sit there for 20 minutes threading the flimsy poles through the flappy pores of material (I’m sure putting this type of tent up could feature on a game show somewhere?) I was on baby entertainment duty. This basically meant: stop babies eating sand.
Once the tent was up , the babies went into it with their toys and we enjoyed sitting on the sand outside, intervening every so often to stop them trying to gauge each others eyeballs or investigate each others nostrils, like they do. To be fair, they played very nicely so we got a bit too confident and thought: let’s go down to the sea for a paddle with them!
Well, this would have been a delightful activity aside from the fact that when we got there, there was a person sat right near the shoreline stinking the area out by smoking something rather ‘untoward,’ shall we say? As much as we could have then been in for a very chilled and calm afternoon (as the person displayed, sprayed out on a beach towel, emitting a smoke cloud storm on a Monday morning,) we weren’t actually keen on our precious poppets bathing in the potent fumes, so we traipsed back up to our ‘campsite. ‘ (Trust me, if you’d seen the amount of stuff we had with us you’d think we’d be there a fortnight.)
By which time it was lunchtime. We couldn’t feed them in the tent because a) only hobbit parents would fit, and b) if we’d tried to feed them through the door a food fight would have ensued. So down came the non-pop-up tent and back across the beach we went! To be honest, the story ends here really (yeah, bit of an anti-climax ending, isn't it? This is more of a British drama than Hollywood disaster...) We found shade (after a long walk) to have lunch with the babies, then we went and loaded the car back up and went home to put the paddling pool up instead! We were shattered. All of this had happened in the space of about 90 minutes and that was enough for us.
We learnt many a lesson that day. I would say there’s a list of things we will try to do differently next time we go, but to be honest, with our Great British weather the next beach trip probably won’t now be until next year- at which point things will probably be very different, taking toddlers to the beach!
That said, my advice to anyone else who might be taking babies to the beach this summer would be: just stay in the garden!!
