If you know me well enough or have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I am not too fond of strollers. …so if you catch me using one, something is up. (I broke down and agreed to bring one on our recent trip to Mexico and am more or less glad that we did. Rolling Caleb around the airport was pretty much the only way to get him to fall asleep!)

I am pretty sure these photos are from last weekend, or perhaps the weekend before (click on the photo, or here, to see more!). I wasn’t feeling great and Caleb was sick as well — he had a runny nose, a cough, and just wasn’t acting like his normal chipper self. We wanted to head outside for an adventure and my biggest priority was making sure he was as warm as possible. So, without much hesitation, I opted to strap him in the stroller and zip him into his mobile sleeping bag (I’m sure it’s called something else).

My constant prodding of, “Are you warm or cold?” seemed to annoy him — he more or less said he was warm every time, no matter how few blocks passed between my interrogations. He also seemed quite content getting the front seat for once, rather than riding on my shoulders or up front, cradled like a sack of potatoes (that weigh as much as an almost 3-year old, I guess). Even so, and despite the nipping wind, he would ask to get out every time I stopped the stroller. So I kept walking.

I must say, covering 2-3 miles pushing a stroller is easier on the back and shoulders than covering the same with your son bopping up and down in the thinner altitude just above your head. That said, I noticed that it was much harder to talk to him when he was below and in front of me, and certainly over the constant grinding of the stroller wheels on concrete, asphalt, dirt and ice.

While our adventures are a reason to be out and about having fun, I think I enjoy most simply walking around with Caleb, having him point things out (his arm jutting over my head, finger stiffly marking something with its posture), and talking endlessly. When my back and shoulders start to hurt too much to keep him up top, I shift him down to my front, almost like a backwards piggy-back ride where he faces in. In this position, I tend to sing to him when we aren’t chatting. In fact, I guess I sing to him a lot when he is like that, and probably enjoy those moments the most.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all that even though I felt as if I only walked a few miles (rather than hiking several times more with a full pack on my back), I enjoyed our stroller ride far less than most of our more “huddled” adventures.

…seems logical to me. At least until he’s bigger than me, I suppose…