The Milwaukie Farmers Market With Young Children

An outdoor market is an unusually good outing with a toddler, and for reasons that have nothing to do with shopping. It is outdoors, it is loud in a friendly way, there is music, there are dogs, and there is something to point at roughly every four feet.

It also costs nothing to walk around, which puts it in a small category of local options you can use repeatedly without it becoming an expense.

When it runs

The Milwaukie Farmers Market runs on Sunday mornings in downtown Milwaukie through the warmer months, with the season ending in autumn. Dates, hours and the exact start and finish of the season change from year to year, so check the market’s own site before you set out rather than relying on anything you read here.

The same applies to the schedule of music, activities and special days. They vary week to week, and the market publishes what is on rather than it being predictable in advance.

Go early

This is the single most useful piece of advice and it applies to every market everywhere.

The first hour is calm. The aisles are wide enough for a pushchair, you can get near a stall without queueing, and the noise level is one a small child can enjoy rather than be overwhelmed by. By the middle of the morning it is busy, the gaps between stalls fill up, and manoeuvring becomes work.

Going early also fits the way toddlers are built. Nine o’clock is the top of most under-fives’ good hours, and being home by lunch means the outing lands inside the cheerful part of the day rather than running into it.

What it is actually like with a toddler

Better than you would expect, with two caveats.

The good part is that a market is a genuine sensory outing. Colour, smells, music, dogs, people, and produce at eye level for a child in a pushchair. Children who are bored in shops are frequently delighted by markets, because nothing is behind glass and everything is happening at once.

The caveats are crowds and cost creep. A busy market is a lot of input for a small child, which is worth watching for. And browsing is free right up until the point somebody spots something they want, which at this age is roughly every third stall.

What is actually worth buying

If you are going to spend anything, a few things are reliably better at a market than at a supermarket and reliably interesting to a small child.

Berries and stone fruit in season are the obvious ones, because they are handed over loose and can be eaten immediately. Bread is easy to carry and easy to share. Flowers cost little and a child holding a bunch of them is a child fully occupied for the walk home. Anything requiring preparation, refrigeration or careful carrying is the wrong purchase to make with a toddler attached to your other hand.

Prices vary by stall and by week, so treat anything you are told about cost as a starting point rather than a rule, and take what you are willing to spend in a form that runs out.

Make it a walk, not a shop

The version of this outing that works is the one where buying things is incidental.

Decide beforehand what you are actually there for — one thing, or nothing — and treat the rest as a walk that happens to have vegetables in it. A toddler is not going to wait patiently while you compare tomatoes, and a market visit built around a shopping list is a market visit that ends badly.

Giving them a job helps enormously. Carrying one item, choosing the apples, holding the bag. A child with a role is a child not being dragged around.

Building a morning around it

Forty minutes at a market is about right, which means it works best as one part of a morning rather than the whole of it.

The natural shape is market first, while everyone is fresh and it is quiet, then something with room to run afterwards. Downtown Milwaukie is compact enough that the riverfront and the parks are a short walk, and our guide to a family day out in downtown Milwaukie puts a longer route together.

If the weather turns, having an indoor stop in mind saves the morning. Our visit page has our opening hours, and our guide to Milwaukie parks and outdoor play covers where to go if it stays dry.

Food at a market with a small child

Markets are full of food, most of it not designed for a two-year-old, and this is where a cheap morning quietly stops being cheap.

Two things help. Feed them before you go, so nothing is being decided by a hungry child at a stall selling doughnuts. And decide in advance whether there is a treat, and what it is, rather than negotiating it fresh at every stand.

Beyond that, markets are genuinely good for trying food. A single peach or a punnet of berries handed over at a stall is a more effective introduction to a new fruit than the same thing produced from a supermarket bag at home, largely because the child watched it being chosen.

Practical notes

Bring your own bag, because you will buy something. Bring water, since it is outdoors and often sunnier than it looked from the car. Cash is worth having even where cards are taken, as it is faster at a busy stall with a child pulling on your arm.

Dogs are common at markets and mostly friendly, but a toddler at eye level with a large dog is a situation worth staying next to. And take the pushchair even for a child who normally walks — not for the market, but for the twenty minutes afterwards when the morning catches up with them.

Our guide to free things to do with kids in Milwaukie covers the other no-cost options locally, several of which combine well with a Sunday morning here.

Frequently asked questions