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Baby's Day Out

By Belinda Clarke

"Isn't this fun?!" I said to my boy. "We are great! We are out! We rock!"

His only response was a small diaper noise, which seemed sweet and inconsequential. I just smiled and kept walking.

The last six blocks from the restaurant to the lake seemed endless, probably because I was starving. With each bump, my Diet Coke splashed into the cup holder and all over. But I kept it together, and we pressed on.

Upon arriving at the lake, I was beat. I carefully laid out a blanket for Nolan and put him down to enjoy the shade and the breeze. It was probably 2 seconds later that he started wailing and one second after that that I realized why. He was soaking wet -- and none too happy about it.

Undaunted, I removed the diaper bag and got out the changing pad, a diaper and the box of wipes. "No problem," I said to him, "lunch can wait!"

And lunch would wait. Ten minutes later I was still cleaning up the mess. What I had thought was an extremely wet diaper turned out to be an extremely wet and outrageously messy one. I felt thankful that I had brought that change of clothes, because he sure needed it.

No sooner had we completed the diaper change then my adorable boy treated me with a new round of complaints. Apparently he was starving too, and unlike my lunch, his lunch would certainly not wait.

I hiked up my shirt and prepared myself for a half hour of feeding. Worse, I had nothing to lean against and no pillow. As I sat there hunched over like Igor from Frankenstein, I glanced out onto the beach for relaxation. The lake was a stunning Mediterranean blue and the beach was calm and empty, well, almost empty. Sprawled out on the sand sat a large group of obnoxiously pretty and fit 20-something college students getting in a last day of tanning. I watched them lounge on their chairs with their paperbacks and thought to myself, "Time to read -- what a concept."