Summer Fun With a Toddler: Expectations vs. Reality

Precious family memories are harder to make than they look

Having a child has forced me to re-calibrate what I think of as “fun.”

It wasn’t that long ago that my idea of “fun” was watching six hours of Mr. Show while eating pizza in pajamas. Or, if I was feeling energetic, attending an after-hours party on the night before Thanksgiving and discovering the next day that stuffing is the perfect hangover food.

Now, I have very little say in what is “fun.” It’s mostly up to my year-and-a-half-old child. It’s not that I no longer enjoy activities on my own, it’s just that if we’re all hanging out as a family, if my kid isn’t having a good time, everybody is having a bad time. 

The simple solution is to choose family activities that our daughter will enjoy, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. If we left it up to her, we’d spend all day drinking apple juice and watching that same video of garbage trucks she’s now been obsessed with for three months, or possibly emptying the kitchen utensils out of all of the drawers. She can’t fully express her wants or needs, even though she thinks she can and gets frustrated when she tries to speak and we don’t understand exactly what she means. So we mostly have to guess what might be fun for her, and we often guess wrong. 

Here’s a selection of summer fun activities we thought might be good things to try with a toddler, and how it all turned out. 

The Park 

Expectation: I’d put a blanket down and let my daughter run around and play in the sandbox and make up little games while I loosely supervised as I skimmed a magazine and had some little snacks. Maybe she’d want me to read her a book. 

Reality: She wants to go on the slide– no, not the little slide. The big one. She wants to go on the swing. She wants to ride the little dolphin on a spring– what are those things called? She wants to go on the merry-go-round, slowly. She wants to RUN DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF OTHER CHILDREN ON THE SWINGS. She wants me to sing the “We are the Dinosaurs” song so that she can dance. The thing about small children is they never leave you alone. I could tell her no and insist on being hands off, but I know there will come a day when she wants nothing to do with me and I’ll wish more than anything that we could be back in the park, my quixotic magazine lying untouched on a picnic blanket as I helped her down the slide for the twelfth time in a row. 

Takeaways: This is much more fun if you do it with another parent friend. 

The Pool

Expectation: Family fun. Precious memories, ripe for family photos.

Reality: When you’re swimming with a very little kid, only one parent gets to relax at a time. My husband used to teach little kids how to swim and has taken the lead on getting Juniper comfortable with water, and so the parent who gets to relax when we take our daughter swimming should technically be me. Except I’m never relaxed, ever. I kept thinking about that  chapter in Freakonomics about how swimming pools are more dangerous to very young children than guns. Is that statistic still true more than twenty years after that book’s publication? Who knows! All I know is that it has fucked me up long-term. 

Takeaways: Swim diapers are worth it. So are baby floats. So is Xanax. 

The Aquarium 

Expectation: I love a good aquarium, and thought that taking my daughter to one would be more fun for me than it was for her. We took her to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the best there is, and I figured if she didn’t have a good time there, then aquariums weren’t in the cards for her. 

Reality: It was awesome. 10/10. She was dazzled and mesmerized. I can’t wait to go back. 

Takeaways: Live in or around Monterey, California or another site of a world-class aquarium, if possible.

A Local Staycation 

Expectation: We all know by now that traveling with small kids is just parenting in an unfamiliar location. I assumed that when we took a short overnight trip to a place a few hours away, we would have to live even more on her schedule than we normally did, on account of the fact that most hotel rooms are just one big room. 

Reality: We set up Juniper’s travel crib in the shower so that my husband and I could hang out in the main room after 8 pm without having to tiptoe around a sleeping baby like we were trying to steal art from the Louvre. It worked, kind of! We couldn’t crank power ballads and screamsing along to them, but we could have a reasonably fun time eating takeout and watching South Park reruns at a very low volume. The biggest bummer was that we had to go downstairs to the lobby bathroom to pee. 

Takeaways: If you’ve got a child under 2, for a trip lasting 4 nights or longer, spring for an AirBnB with enough separate bedrooms that you’re not all prisoners of each other. Three nights or less, try for an all-suites hotel. One night, just put your kid’s crib in the bathroom. They’ll be fine. 

The Zoo

Expectation: I’d get to witness my kid’s childlike wonder at seeing some of the world’s most beautiful creatures close up, lasting about an hour before her energy ran out and we just got to push her around in her stroller and enjoy the zoo ourselves. 

Reality: She wanted to run around. This wasn’t a great idea because the zoo is crowded during the summer and it’s actually kind of worse on weekdays because of the field trips–summer camps and summer schools rolling past every exhibit in groups of 20-30 children screaming with Field Trip Energy, banging on glass, pushing people out of the way, etc. Elementary school aged children in large groups are about 10 minutes of unsupervised time from turning into Lil’ Yellowjackets. So our tiny little kid wanted to run around through the crowd, only moderately interested in the animals. Instead she wanted to stop by every trash to pat it on the side because there’s a picture of a raccoon on the trash cans at the zoo, and she has a stuffed raccoon she likes to sleep with.She was also interested in pointing out litter that was on the ground, which she did by saying “UH OH!” or “OH NO!” Our daughter is in her trash era. 

Takeaways: Go right when the zoo opens on a weekend day when the weather is cloudy and mild. See about getting a family membership; they usually pay for themselves after a couple of visits, and then you won’t need to feel pressured to get it all done in a day. 

The Beach

Expectation: Haven’t attempted this one yet because every time I think about going to the beach with my kid, my brain pitches a limited series’ worth of ways that the experience could easily become a pain in the ass – the sheer volume of sticky, zinc-y sunscreen required to adequately cover my kid’s skin, the constant power struggle that is convincing my daughter to keep her hat on so that her head doesn’t get sunburned through her white-blonde hair, the agony of realizing too late that I missed a spot and she’s going to get a sunburn, sand getting everywhere, especially into butts. I can picture other people’s rowdy kids and beach games and unauthorized off leash dogs knocking Juniper down at high speeds, out of control frisbees and footballs tossed by inconsiderate teens, riptides and washed up kelp blooming with flies, sharp shells. I think of how unrelaxing it is to try to keep a toddler confined to any small space at all when all she wants to do is run and explore. The best case scenario is that none of these things happen, despite my living in a constant state of vigilance and fear that they could at any moment. 

Reality: Will report back.