I have heard people say, "Parenting is not a sprint; it's a marathon." So how exactly does one quantify a 12-kilometer race?

This weekend, I may have inflicted irreparable damage on my 9-month-old when he and I attended San Francisco's Bay to Breakers 12k. The event hosts colorful athletes running through the city streets in an array of DIY costumes. They dressed as unicorns and monsters, transvestites and superheroes. They wore bathing suits, three-piece suits and birthday suits. Yes, birthday suits. As in, nude. In the buff. Au naturel. Unclad. Threadbare. Buck-naked! I don't have enough digits to count all the bare bottoms I saw.

Yet there I was, applauding all the glittering, sparkling, LED-lit — some altogether bare — crazy runners. The atmosphere was joyous, and I was getting high off the fumes — that is, until I heard the high-pitched cheers of a kindergartener in the crowd. I turned to see the young spectator and his mom, pressed against the rollout wire fence and absorbing the San Francisco scene.

I was appalled. Surely, Bay to Breakers is no place to bring a child. It's not like a sporting event at which a random streaker may assail your child's eyes. Here you knew there would be nudity. It was celebrated. Politicized. Voted on and vetted for.

What kind of parent brings her kid to this type of event?! I was staring down the mother, disgusted, when I heard a cough from a young boy. My young boy. Strapped in his carrier, my son was avidly watching the steady stream of streaking striders.

Oh, right, I'm that kind of parent.

"Parenting is not a sprint; it's a marathon." I take this to mean that a few isolated mistakes do not make a bad parent. Rather, it's the culmination of many mistakes and poor decisions over a lifetime. I'm confident that watching the nudie run was not traumatic enough to render therapy bills for the next 18 years of my child's life. However, if I'm being honest, it was only one of the many bad choices I made this past weekend.

Introducing "My Run of Bad Parenting Choices" — the 12k edition.

1) Friday morning, I took my son to get his nine-month vaccinations, knowing full well that not only would he feel miserable after getting shots but also I would be strapping him in the car afterward for a six-hour drive. The idiocy of my planning did not occur to me until I was an hour in and the ceaseless screaming from the backseat led me to fasten two diapers over my ears — which, by the way, do not adhere to your skin as well as you would hope. You also get strange looks from fellow drivers.

2) After arriving at my friends' house, I realized the baby monitor I had brought had a dead battery. The bad parenting choice comes from the fact that I had turned on the baby monitor at home to check whether the battery was good and, after discovering that it was, forgotten to turn off the power.

3) Unwilling to leave my baby out of earshot without a monitor, I kept him by my side as my friends and I hung out. Until 3 a.m. My son stayed awake the whole time.

4) Also staying awake with us was my friends' pit bull. I know her to be a good dog, but it didn't occur to me until after she licked my son's face and my son retaliated by swatting her face that perhaps I shouldn't be so cavalier. A good pit bull still has a bite that Joan Rivers would be proud of.

5) Staying up late made my son impossible to wake in the morning, thus causing public transportation to no longer be a viable means of getting us to the race on time. That led to my taking a cab — without a car seat. I held my baby in my lap, a la Britney Spears.

Nine months in, I still am trying to decipher what is and is not bad parenting based on my own standards. Going to a fun-filled, albeit naked, event is probably not a big deal. Riding in a car without a car seat, even legally in a cab, is. In the marathon of parenting, I'm confident I will cross the finish line and receive my pretty medal. But in the parenting 12k, I may have lost the race.

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