Today I had a park date with friends who have children the same ages as ours. I admired their smart new picnic bag; they praised my pull-along shopping trolley, which they reassured me didn’t look in the least granny-ish (liars). They magicked up snacks; I whipped out hand san. They pulled out a wipe for a scraped leg; I produced out a toilet roll for the tears. We had it covered.
“I never leave home without a toilet roll!” I joked.
“You could write a blog about that!” one friend said.
Et voila.
In the baby magazines I used to read, there are articles about packing the perfect change bag (nappies, wipes, tiny tubes of nappy rash cream, etc.) But it seems to me there is a dearth of guidance about the bag you pack for day out with the primary-age child (beyond some cute ideas about tat bags to take to restaurants), so we just make it up and hope for the best. Also, in the absence of a buggy with storage underneath, where to put all the stuff? Even just drinks and snacks for five people is a tall order to carry about on your back. We have experimented, and got it wrong, and asked people who do it better, so perhaps we are on our way to an optimal set-up.
Perhaps you could help me out by commenting with your ideas of what is surplus in (or missing from) our giant list please?
On holiday this summer, my husband’s aunt advised us of lovely little beaches only accessible by massive long metal steps.
“No!” we said vigorously. “How would we get the STUFF there?”
“We would just run down all the steps in our jelly shoes, and my mum would carry the picnic and towels – that’s all you need!” replied the aunt.
Ho, ho – no. Not so for us!
The main extravagant item we take on a beach day out (or to a music festival or whatever) is a pop-up gazebo. It’s massive and heavy and probably not designed for regular outings, but it does go in a bag I can just about carry on my back or slot inside a pull-along. I don’t actually think I’m going to convince anyone but here goes…
Everyone else on the beach has a windbreak or a pop-up beach tent which is not big enough for five people to lie in. You know what? We might look ridiculous lugging this thing down to the beach, but we don’t get burnt and we don’t get rained on, and we can all fit comfortably and set up all our stuff, and hang all the wetsuits and ponchos from round the sides to dry out. (Also, this year we were at a music festival in a downpour, and a gazebo made us instantly popular which was fun.)
Ah yes – wetsuits and ponchos. The hardy older generation made do with a swimsuit and a towel but why be cold and miserable when you can be less so? Put our younger boys in trunks and we only get a few minutes in the sea before they turn blue and teeth-chattering and sad; in wetsuits we get MUCH longer. And poncho towels are just the most convenient thing for sticking on over yourself for getting changed and for keeping the wind off. We have microfiber ones which aren’t the most absorbent, but do fold up to almost nothing. (Today at the park paddling pools we leant them out to little friends, so maybe they’ll be converted.)
Everyone brings beach toys like buckets and spades and things to throw and catch, but I also like to spice things up(!) by rotating in things like a boomerang, a stomp rocket, a scatch set, etc. Also every now and again I like to bring out a kite which the poor husband frequently has to remind me is actually missing a bit, but we always seem to spend a chunk of time trying to put it together and run up and down unsuccessfully so it does its job in its own way!
We generally take a bunch of not really beach stuff too, which makes us pretty nerdy but keeps everyone quiet and happy. A pack of acrylic pens is small and light and provides hours of entertainment decorating rocks. (The only problem is that the boys then want to take home said precious drawn on rocks, but we’ve now invented a system that we bury them as treasure for someone else to enjoy finding. Often that person is us the next day as we are such creatures of habit.) Packs of cards are also small and light and good for filling time. My favourite beach card games are Top Trumps, Go find it, and Sussed, mostly because we are holding the cards and they don’t get blown away or covered in sand, and Dobble just about works too. I always have a book that everyone will be happy to listen to (Michael Morpurgo, Roald Dahl, etc.) and that can be a winner for a quiet half hour.
We found these really cool “drawing bags” from Ikea that fit books and paper and pens in, and they are really handy for e.g. taking when you visit somewhere not that child-friendly and you need the children to sit quietly for a bit, like visiting elderly relatives. Sometimes the boys choose to take these to the beach too, but they have to carry them themselves because they are pretty bulky so not the best for beach days.
Then there’s the actual stuff to sit on. We’ve upgraded to two picnic rugs, as one just isn’t big enough for five bottoms; plus experimented with little folding stools as carrying camping chairs as well as all the rest of the clobber isn’t the easiest, and the tiny lightweight ones seem to need extra bits to stop them sinking into sand.
Lastly, of course the all-important food and drinks. My main objective with food on a day out is to keep everyone well watered and fed and stave off temptation to buy over-priced stuff. And the temptation is all-around! Of course we see everyone eating ice-cream and fancy one ourselves. Which is fine for a lovely treat but not ideal as a daily expectation. (My kind sister-in-law bought the six of us a round of ice-creams at a beach in Devon, and the bill came to £21 which is MORE THAN THE WHOLE DINNER she bought us the next day!) So I like to get in there early with the frozen snacks, find a Co-op or something and buy a box of ice lollies or vegan ice creams soon after we arrive, and so then if we’re walking past kiosks or whatever the children don’t ask because they know they’re not getting another one because they’ve already had one. Similarly, if there’s really nice rocky road slices or something already in the lunchboxes, there’s less pull to go to buy treats from the cafes.
I’ve already blogged on my fav lunchboxes (bit sad: https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-seasons-and-tips ) but I feel like I’ve been on a long quest for optimal drinks bottles. We now all have our own giant Sistema ones, and I carry a tiny bottle of super concentrated squash so if we run out and have to refill at a drinking water tap (or ask at a nearby café or kiosk – they always say yes) I can make it into squash again.
I was at a parkdate with another friend not that long ago, and she pulled out some mugs and tea bags and a thermos of hot water, and I thought, Genius! Why has this taken me so long to figure out we could do this on a drizzly day at the park? My husband bought me a thermos drinking flask which is fab but insanely effective, so my students get to snigger at me when I try to take a sip in a lesson and then remember it’s still basically boiling.
So that is most of our clobber and we generally get a good long day out of it. I don’t know if I should feel more embarrassed by how long it takes us to pack up and stagger back to the car, but I honestly don’t know what I’d miss out from the list. (My husband also often adds to this list his kayak, kayak wheels, buoyancy aids, VHF radio, fishing gear... and then depending on how well this went, a camp stove, frying pan, oil, paper plates, forks, etc. and likes to catch a fish and cook it on the beach, but even I admit that may be going a little too far…)
To transport stuff we tried a pull-along wagon (get one with wide wheels if you want to use it on sand) but now mostly get by with the pull-along shopping trolley and piling stuff on the kayak. The pull-along was a lockdown purchase mostly to cart around a bog-in-the-bag because we’d go off on walks (when it was allowed, of course) and then there’d be no public toilets open anywhere. The bog-in-the-bag is now thankfully gathering dust, although I do still sometimes chuck it in the boot with all the other ‘emergency’ stuff (spare clothes bag, umbrellas, back-up cartons of juice) just in case. We also have a urinal bottle which was handy in the safari park (learnt that after a friend told me about speed eating Pringles after her little boy got desperate in the lion enclosure).
Our church recently had a daytrip to the beach. There were 70 of us, and it was a really lovely day. As we got on the coach and I loaded all our stuff into the hold compartment, one friend strolled on with his little rucksack, and I thought, I wonder if I could trim things back a bit? And then I thought, Nah!
What are your top tips of things (not) to take on a family holiday out please?
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