Dave the Dad 9 - Life's a Beach
After the pebbles of Brighton the warm soft sands of the Gower seemed like Paradise.Tom was in his element: scanning the flat horizon for sharp objects, furry creatures or new people to stare at menacingly. Actually Tom looks far from menacing even in the dimmest light but he does like a good hard stare. I've lived in London at various times and I know for a fact that if you have to turn around and find something staring at you then you can discover far worse things than an angelic one year old. For one thing he's never yet acted as though he wanted to stab someone just because they were reading on the tube. Still, people do become unnerved.
The fact is that for all his pretty smiling photos Tom takes a while to warm up to strangers. So while they jump up and down, squeak and gibber in any and all attempts to make him smile he stares at them impassively. He occasionally gives a flicker of recognition only to retreat behind mum's legs and watch, like a hunter weighing up the possibilities of befriending a frothing bear. Of course once said visitors are exhausted through the effort of jumping, peek-a-booing, beeping, singing and crawling Tom comes around and figures that it's safe enough to give something back. He either takes after his mum, who is quite a shy person with the usual accompanying penchant for studying others, or like my father, who is a sociopath.
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So, the beach. All the nearby holiday-makers had given up on cheering our son and now Tom could settle in to some serious exploration. Now I've wondered aloud before why babies love tasting their environment but the extent of this still shocks me. We came down to the beach on four out of seven days (an almost unbelievable run of fine days for South Wales, reminiscent of Apollo 13 making it back to Earth in one piece) and each and every time Tom's first action was to flop onto his face and start licking. Throughout the course of the day we would mop and sponge, feed him little squares of cheese sandwich and liberally pour in fresh water, all to no avail. He would still have at least half a cheekful of sand by the time we got back to our chalet. It didn't faze him; it's just that it didn't make our picnic any tastier knowing that our son was grinding his newly made, painfully born teeth to powder.
What we loved most about the beach was the distraction it offered young Tom. Kids! Sandcastles! Sea! Gulls! Huge dangerous trucks bumping boats to the water at 35 mph! Often he could spend a good five minutes just sitting there, spooning sand into one of his pockets before the obligatory tasting session at the end. Hmmm, I believe this is an 1873, a cheeky little number with just a smidgen of ash. You think you're relatively safe, once you've gotten over the fact that he will eat a portion of the beach. But on the first day we realised our mistake as we placed Tom down and then unpacked the eighteen swollen bags that now seem to accompany us at all times- just in case. We turn around and he's eating something: something dark-ish, big-ish, something decidedly unfriendly. He's pulling a face and we look at each other for a split second. You know the one: did you give him a bit of fruit? Anyway, it was a fag-end. Rather mangled by our son's splendid choppers but thankfully intact. He was pretty glad to get rid of it too. All of which meant that each time we hit the beach we spent at least three minutes combing for nasties and throwing them as far as we could. There is an outside chance that some fellow beach-users thought we were druids, encasing our family unit in a filth circle to keep out unwanted spirits. Or, in our case, anyone who might possibly look as though they were carrying anything less than the size of a golf ball.
Most days we would amble down to the water: Jane in her stripey Boden, me holding in my stomach, Tom in a dashing Little Dippers wetsuit. I don't want to sound like an advert but this is terrific, a one-piece item with Velcro straps that fold across the body, legs and arms. When shopping for his first outdoor bather we came across a whole host of similar numbers but all of them demanded that you feed your squiggling bundle into a tight rubberized suit through what appeared to a hole big enough for a ferret. On a diet. The Little Dippers wetsuit took away all the fuss and also made him look quite cool, in both senses of the word. We would run/jog/jump/hop to the sea before a damn good bobbing in the waves. Tom's first reaction to the water was the appropriate one for Britain: he shivered. But then he did all the things we love to see and laughed, whooped, splashed his arms, kicked his legs and shook his head in delight. We even tried placing him on the verge where the water could gently lap his bum and legs, but opted to forego this when he flung himself face down and tried to lick the onrushing wave.
As we walked back to our manky magic circle on one visit we stopped to look at a terrific castle being erected painstakingly along the wet sand. Moats, keeps, layer upon layer of buildings, turrets and arches, all delicately featured with window slits and door carvings. Tom was fascinated but strained to be let loose like Gulliver on those unsuspecting Lilliputians so we had to move on, past the master builder and, within a few feet, past his two disconsolate, excluded kids. Some people think that sandcastle building is a matter of life or death but for others it's clearly far more important.
2 Sept 2006
Dave Fouracre aka "Dave the Dad" is a regular feature writer here at thebabywebsite.com. Read more about his hilarious experiences as a Dad. |
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