I Let My Big Kid Use a Stroller
Being a parent is like being a shark.
Last week, wrote about her choice to take her kids out of the stroller once they could walk. This week, offers a different perspective.
The last time my son fell asleep in the stroller, he was four. It was 95 degrees and humid. I wiped the sweat from between my boobs discreetly with the back of my hand as I walked him slowly through the woods near my house on a paved trail. For some reason, I knew this was the last time he’d ever sleep in the stroller. I don’t know how I knew; it was just one of those things that hits you like a bolt of lightning, something you just know, but you don’t know how you know. So rarely in life does that ever happen to me. Most of the time I walk around unsure about anything, terrified about what might happen. But this time, I looked down at my son, newly four years old, reclined back in the blue Nuna stroller my husband and I had picked out nearly five years earlier and it just came to me that this was the last time we’d be doing this. I felt sad.
My husband and I had picked out the stroller in a pandemic (you might remember the one) and ordered it online without being able to test it, but unlike so many mistakes in parenting we’ve made since then, this time we nailed it. The blue Nuna had served us well over the last few years. We had no idea, when we made that hasty online purchase, how much time we were going to spend with this thing. I can’t express enough how glad I am we paid for the good suspension and the durability to accidentally drop the (empty) stroller down a whole flight of stairs without it snapping into pieces.
As we walked through the woods, I touched the worn-off leather on the handle, folded over the sun-bleached canopy. The last ever stroller nap. I popped in my AirPods and switched on a podcast like I had hundreds, maybe even thousands of times and settled in, feeling the damp air around me, the soft bump of the wheels against the paved path through the woods. Just me, my son, and the stroller, like it had been so many times before.
For almost four years, my son had refused to nap any other way than in the stroller.