Remote with Nursery
The office is off the beaten path, so should the Nursery
There is all the newfound appreciation for people working from home (well, there was anyway). There are stories about creating the perfect environment. There are stories about dealing with remote burnout. Seriously, check out the wave of remote work stories here on Medium starting in 2020.
As someone who has spent the better part of a decade working from home, it is nice to see all this vindication. It also means I can spot the difference between the recently new work from the home person and the seasoned digital nomad. However, there is a whole level of remote working that some have practiced for a while. To paint a picture, I put fingers to keys and wrote a blurb about my mid-week beach office in 2020:
In this medium story, I will describe an experimental upgrade to my beach office performed at the end of the 2020 beach season.
The Set-up
What do you need to be successful?
Baseline Beach Office
As mentioned before, you need a baseline beach office. I will not retread that same ground I already covered. Changes would of course include more recent versions of the supporting products presented. For example, the Nighthawk M5 5G WiFi 6 Mobile Router is now available and it works better than I expected. There is also a newer camping cube. A new component to the beach office is a logical aide known as the Igloo Trailmate. It is a cooler with ground clearance and tie-downs to haul stuff across the sand.
Regarding my previous story’s reference to mobile power….
Please please please, if you are a corporate IT purchasing decision-maker make sure the laptops you issue to your employees are capable of using USB-C as power input. Issuing laptops that need vendor-proprietary power supplies represents a burden to employees and employers. As an employer, you now have to inventory a few spares and your mobile employees are transporting yet another brick in their laptop bags. Your employees already need to keep other USB-C items charged and may already have a power pack. Additionally, an employer loses “green-woke-sustainability” points by using a proprietary solution.
Infant Add-ons
Now that we have the baseline office configured, what are the infant accouterments I need to be successful? Since we are talking infants, the first thing you need is a Thunderdome..uh..err baby dome. As pictured above, the baby dome provides an extra sand-free boundary. Having the camping cube provides a sand-free area to protect your personal and corporate-issued electronics. The baby dome inside of the doom creates a sand-free play and nap area. The shade top is an added bonus.
As an infant needs a warm bottle you should get a portable bottle warmer. Of course, you should have pre-made bottles and not risk having a beach mixing accident. Otherwise, all your other baby bag items are relevant. You will be doing extra hand-wiping because of the sand and you will need to be extra vigilant about that hand wiping. Everyone reading this with an infant can imagine how their little one will react to sand grains in their eyes!
Bonus items would include a Veer Cruiser as logistical support (as in moving kids to the beach) instead of the previously mentioned cooler.
Grandma’s Required
Now that you are on the beach at the start of the business day. Looks like you have a meeting. You are comfortable in your beach tent and you have excellent connectivity so you join the meeting with blurred background video. One problem, who is watching the baby?
Okay, my privilege is going to show. I have two retired child-rearing professionals available to me. They have the appropriate credentials and titles of my mom and my wife’s mom. Grade-A certified professional caregivers that have skin (literal DNA) in the game. As my wife and I can both work remotely this works out great. We can have the whole family on the beach. Lunch breaks with the family under the canopy.
Regardless, of all the “technology” you can bring with you to make your beach-office-nursey possible it will not matter if there is no caregiver. YOU are still at work and you just so happen to be at the beach. No Grandma? Are both parents working? I doubt another relative, or neighborhood babysitter, or professional nanny will complain about being trapped on the beach.
Final thoughts
For those that have the privilege of beach access and child care providers, consider having a beach office that is infant-ready. As your child grows you will revert back to basic beach office. Of course, if you then have another infant you are ready to go and have amortized the cost of such a set-up across your kids. This set-up is also camping-capable. You will only need a bug barrier strategy.
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