Babes at the beach
A couple of observations about Italian baby beach culture (as we experienced it):
Apparently, strollers are a necessity. Is this true elsewhere? I noticed it for the first time this summer and honestly, I find it a little odd, considering that sand and wheels don't mix, and that the purpose of strollers is to wheel babies around.
One morning I was about to point out all the strollers out to N, but he beat me to it, and he wanted to know why we didn't have a stroller with us. I told him that I couldn't imagine what we would have done with it, because Pata would never sit quietly in a stroller parked under a beach umbrella. N was convinced that there must have been a good reason for all the strollers around, because everyone had gone through the trouble of lugging them down to the beach. (There were even some families with more than one!) So the next day he insisted on dragging Pata's stroller through the sand to our umbrella, where it sat empty until he folded it up again to bring it back to the apartment.
The next day we didn't bring the stroller to the beach, but now I was really curious about why other people did, so I observed our neighbors to understand why. What I saw confirmed something I had always suspected: there really are babies who sit quietly by themselves for hours. As fascinating as this discovery was, I was left wondering why anyone would bother bringing babies to the beach if they're just going to sit in strollers all day long?
Well, that question isn't entirely fair because those babies weren't really in their strollers all day long, which brings me to the second observation. Another must-have is a small, inflatable pool. Everyone with children under two had one, filled with seawater and placed in the shadow of a beach umbrella. We brought one with us the first two days to help Pata get used to the water. After that, we upgraded to an inner tube with leg holes and just brought her with us whenever we went swimming.
But very few babies ever ventured out of their pools, and at seven months, Pata was the youngest baby in the water. I wonder if the other babies had as much fun as she did. Were they all afraid of swimming in the sea? Or did their parents think the water was too cold? Maybe they were worried about exposing their babies' delicate skin to the sun. I can understand that because Pata is very fair, but a good water-resistant sunscreen kept her from burning.
Poor little babies, circumscribed to their tiny pools. Maybe some of them preferred it that way, but there must have been others who would have enjoyed swimming with mom and dad, the way Pata did. I felt almost as bad for all the dads whose job it was to fill up the pools. Being rather soft-sided, it was impossible to fill these pools up at water's edge and then carry them back up to the umbrellas. So every morning the dads, armed with children's tiny toy buckets, would make several trips up and down the beach to fill them up. Not a fun way to begin a day at the beach.
Posts
