Katrina Schwartz: It’s big shoes to fill but I’m excited to do it.
Olivia Allen-Price: If you’ve been listening closely to the show for a while you actually probably know that Katrina herself just got back from her own maternity leave in January so there’s something in the water here. You might say that we’re kind of in the young family trenches. Which is actually really lovely to be doing it together.
Katrina Schwartz: Yeah.
Olivia Allen-Price: Now shortly after my first child, Sullivan, was born, a listener sent in a question asking how having a kid had impacted my life in the Bay Area. And to be honest, when I first saw that question, I was still a brand new parent and I felt super under qualified to answer it. But now that I’ve got four years under my belt, we thought for this special maternity leave announcement bonus episode, that we would talk a bit about our experiences parenting in the Bay Area.
Katrina Schwartz: Plus, we asked you about your favorite places to take kids, so we’ll share those answers too.
Olivia Allen-Price: I’m Olivia Allen-Price.
Katrina Schwartz: And I’m Katrina Schwartz.
Olivia Allen-Price: This is Bay Curious, stay with us.
Olivia Allen-Price: So the question this week is honestly massive. How has having kids impacted our lives in the Bay Area? At least for me, having a kid has been the single most drastically life altering thing that I’ve ever done. And I imagine I ever will do, is that true for you?
Katrina Schwartz: Yeah, having my daughter Esme was a total reorientation of life. So we grouped this episode into three big ways that our lives in the Bay Area have changed. Community, our favorite places and spaces to go with kids, and housing.
So the first one is the impact on our communities. One big way that having a kid has changed life is that it changes who you hang out with, who you see, who you identify with, in some dramatic ways.
Olivia Allen-Price: Yeah, so for me, I feel like my community, because I did not grow up in the Bay Area, I moved here a little over a decade ago, my community drastically grew. I had friends before, sure, but joining, you know, parent organizations, sending my kid eventually off to daycare, honestly, just like saying hello to people at the local park and then kind of seeing them week in and week out and building relationships there. I just have so many more people in my life now than I did four or five years ago before Sullivan was born. And that’s been probably like one of the things that have brought me the most joy is just watching my network grow.
There’s a number of other transplants that I’ve connected with and we kind of, you know, lament that we are doing this without family nearby. But what’s been kind of cool is I feel like there’s, you know we’ve formed this network of people who are in the same boat, who are raising kids without family. And we almost like make these packs where it’s like, I will show up for you just like family would. You can ask me to do the favor that really sucks. Like I will pick you up from the airport at 6 a.m. if that’s what you need. So having a child has kind of opened the door to like these deeper, richer relationships because of just like pure necessity. But your experience has been a bit different because you had a deep community here.
Katrina Schwartz: I ended up having my daughter when a lot of other friends were having babies. And so there’s been this sort of deepening of connection to people that I’ve known for a long time. A lot of my friends come from the frisbee community. So there are people that did an activity with that I really love and have grown with over time. But now we’re all going through this kind of momentous life change as well and watching how our community spaces and the things we wanna do together change because we’re now parents. So that’s been really cool, but also just the facts of it, like I do not see my friends that live in the far East Bay as much as I used to. I just don’t have the time to like be driving a screaming baby an hour across the Bay, you know? So I end up hanging out more with the people that live close to me. So proximity has become kind of like a bigger deal than it was before.
Olivia Allen-Price: Okay, so the second way that children, we have decided, have greatly impacted our lives here is that parenthood has changed our favorite places and spaces.
Katrina Schwartz: When we started talking about this, my first reaction was when I had first had my daughter, it was so hard to go even just leave the house because I had to know where I could pump. Like she wasn’t very good at breastfeeding for a while and so I just remember this fateful visit to the park, to the Arboretum for the pianos and I was toting my milk pump and it needed to be plugged in and there was nowhere to plug it in and I needed an adapter and it was such a fiasco. So there is this sort of like mental map of where you can pump when you’re out and about.
But then just like more generally, even as she’s gotten older, we don’t go out to restaurants as much. We’re certainly not going out to as many concerts and late night things. And when we go on hikes, they have to be short because you’re on a timeline.
Olivia Allen-Price: Yeah, I think our favorite places and spaces have changed. Obviously, we’re just more attuned to places that are kid-friendly now. You can walk into a restaurant and just feel if the host or hostess is looking at you with pleasure, happy you are there, or like, oh no, we have kids, we have to find a corner to stuff them in. So I definitely think we have changed our favorite restaurants to some degree.
I think also, one thing I will say very positively about the Bay Area is I think we have throughout the region just fantastic playgrounds. When we travel outside of the region and we’re staying at a hotel or an Airbnb or we’re back with family on the East Coast, I am always shocked at how far we have to travel to find the nearest playground. No matter where we are in the Bay Area, if we’re stopping off at a playground to let our child burn off some energy, there are solid options here.
Katrina Schwartz: Yeah, we have one around the corner. I mean, Esme is not quite old enough for playgrounds, but definitely excited to go there when she’s ready, beyond swing time, which is what we’re at right now.
Olivia Allen-Price: So we wanted to offer up some concrete suggestions, some favorite places and spaces. So we actually invited you, our Bay Curious listeners, to share, and we also asked some colleagues at KQED to share. So let’s just hear some of the favorite spots in the Bay Area for kids.
Jason: Hey, I love you guy’s podcast. This is Jason from Alameda. And I just want to give a shout out to Zocalo Coffeehouse. That’s Z-o-c-a-l-o in San Leandro. They have this awesome play area in the back that’s surrounded by waist high walls. So it’s mostly closed in. It helps keep both the kid and the noise inside for the most part. I have great memories of taking my son there when he was younger.
Derek Heilman: This is Derek and Jack Heilman. And Jack, my eight-year-old son who’s here with me, loves going to the sand dunes down near Monterey and Seaside. They’re incredible for rolling down and running up and sliding on boards and just having all sorts of fun.
Carly Severn: Hello Bay Curious, it’s me, your occasional correspondent on all things weird and spooky, Carly Severn. One of my favorite places to take kids in the Bay Area is called Stafford Lake Park. It is in the North Bay, it is just west of Novato. This place rules because it has a big kids playground by the lake that is full of stuff to jump on and explore. It also has this big zipline which is just far off enough ground to feel exciting for them. And aside from the playground, Stafford Lake itself is just seriously beautiful. It is part of the Marin County Park system, so there are these lovely hikes all around the lake, and also a bike park too.
Ted Goldberg: Hey, this is Ted Goldberg. I’m the managing editor of News and Newscast at KQED and I’m gonna take off my journalist hat and put on my dad of two kids in San Francisco hat. When my kids were younger, we used to go over to the George Christopher Playground over in Diamond Heights. We’d go there, play, there was a big dog walking sort of field right there, which is actually the very top of Glen Canyon. And so we would hike all the way down to the bottom of Glen Canyon, which I think is one of the most beautiful places in San Francisco. And then we’d walk all the way to yet another playground. There’s also a rec center at the bottom of Glen Park. So we’d make a whole day out of it. Two playgrounds and a hike in one of the most beautiful places in the city.
Julia Hughes: Hey, my name is Julia Hughes. I live in Berkeley. The favorite place that I grew up going to and that I take my kids to is Adventure Playground. It’s in the Berkeley Marina. It is free to go into and it has like structures and things that are built by the kids who go there and it’s all reused recycled materials. It kind of takes you back to like the 80s era where kids could roam free and just play. I mean there’s just so many things and it’s so different from anywhere else.
Laura: Hi, it’s Laura, and I live in San Francisco, and one thing that we love to do with our kids is go into Golden Gate Park, and you don’t need to have any agenda, you can just roll on in, and there’s so many cool things to explore. One thing we like to do is look for fairy doors, and then see what’s inside of them. We also love going to Blue Heron Lake, and at this time of year, you might be able to find babies, like ducklings. It’s also really fun to take out a paddle boat, or pro tip, the line is much shorter if you take out a row boat.
Olivia Allen-Price: Is there anything that we would add to this list? I mean, you can’t skip over our great museums, especially once your kid gets a little bit older, once they’re kind of like three plus. We have had a great time at CuriOdyssey in San Mateo. I think it’s especially great because it’s the one closest to our house. I think, if you’re a parent here, find the closest museum that is age appropriate for your child and buy a membership and just go all the time. We’ve had great experiences at the Oakland Zoo, the Discovery Museum in San Jose, a lot of people love the one in Sausalito as well. I haven’t been to Fairyland or the Exploratorium or the Cal Academy of Sciences with my child yet, but that’s definitely on the agenda. I think no matter what quadrant of the Bay Area you live in, there is a fantastic museum that is age appropriate for younger kids.
Katrina Schwartz: And Fairyland we did a story about so you could go check out the origins of fairyland.
Olivia Allen-Price: Should we drop the link in the show notes?
Katrina Schwartz: Oh, definitely.
Olivia Allen-Price: What about you? Anything that you want to throw in?
Katrina Schwartz: Well, right now my daughter’s still too young for a lot of those things, but I am really excited for some of the sort of whimsical things around the Bay Area. Like we recently did that story about the fairy houses in Point Richmond, which sounds so fun to me. I can’t wait until Esme is like old enough to really enjoy that and just kind of finding these little hidden treasures around the Bay Area. I’m excited for that.
Olivia Allen-Price: We’ll put a link to the Fairy Houses piece in our show notes, along with a few other resources that KQED has produced over the years, all about places to take kids.
Katrina Schwartz: Okay, so the third big bucket that we kind of thought about here is so Bay Area, which is housing.
Olivia Allen-Price: Housing. We were lucky enough that the house that we were in, when we first started renting it, we were thinking already about the possibility of a child. So we did rent a place that had enough space to do that. So with the addition of our first child, it wasn’t a big deal. We lost our guest bedroom, but that was always a luxury anyway. But now we’re trying to add a second into the same house. So we don’t have like an extra bedroom at this point. So the baby will be with us for a while eventually in the same room with our four-year-old and we’re kind of curious how that’s going to go. Actually the first kind of project for myself on maternity leave is re-puzzling our house together. So it’s going to work for a family of four instead of a family of three. And it’s gonna be tight quarters. I mean I think our house is something like 900 square feet. But I grew up in a big ranch house in North Carolina where acres and acres of land came cheap. So the idea of puzzling our growing family into this space that feels tiny is gonna be a challenge.
Katrina Schwartz: Well, and you know, I do think it’s a moment to re-evaluate what your priorities are, because certainly people, you know if they have the means, go buy a house sometimes when they have a kid. But I know tons of people who are just making it work with the space they have because of limitations around rent and things like that. And you know wanting to stay in the city. I mean, you have to kind of think about like what’s most important to you, like the house, the place you live, your community, like what you want to be near. These questions come up more frequently as you talk about adding people to your family and having less. Flexibility, I guess, with where you are. We actually had to leave the place that we had been living for over 10 years when I was pregnant, and it was a little bit scary. We didn’t know where we were gonna be able to land, what we could afford, but we got very lucky to move into a place right next door to some friends who have a baby who’s about the same age as our kid. So we actually have a lot of community right where we live, which has been totally awesome. But there was a moment of uncertainty there that was kind of scary.
Olivia Allen-Price: Yeah, I feel like housing decisions in the Bay Area are especially tough. And yeah, probably one of the harder things about raising kids here. Okay, and with that, I will officially pass you the host baton. Do you wanna take us out?
Katrina Schwartz: Yeah. Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Our show is produced by Olivia Allen Price, Christopher Beal, Gabriela Glueck, and me, Katrina Schwartz. Extra support from Katie Springer. Maha Sanad. Alana Walker. Jen Chien. Holly Kernan. And everyone at team KQED. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.
I’ll be back later this week with a very special episode featuring the voices of four Bay Area high school students. It’s part of Youth Takeover Week here at KQED, and it’s really something special. Make sure you don’t miss it. Have a great week.
