Last weekend we embarked on a practice I found so confusing, that to re-address the mangaled mess that was my brain I was forced into biting my own tongue.
That practice? Pram shopping.
We went to a place called…and I am mildly embarrassed to say this…Baby Barn. To Kim, this created some beautiful old farm house set deep in the surrey country side where couples went to exercise their newly granted right of pushing around empty push chairs hand in hand through a field of recently blossomed daisies. To me, I though it was going to be a bombed out shack on a disused farm rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of child locked in there by his deranged mother. It’s funny how different we are sometimes.
Sadly Kim got it near enough spot on.
The alarm bells stared ringing for me when we arrived in the car-park to find a couple with a 4 year old wearing a flat cap.
This has to be my biggest concern at the moment – I really do want to meet other couples in similar situations and talk through about how they are finding it and coping etc – but we keep on encountering parents trying to raise children in the image of 1950’s Yorkshiremen. Nothing wrong with that, but they all seem to be a little phoney.
It was rife with them in the barn – at least it was actually a barn and not a ‘unit’ on business park off the M25. Dad’s to be who choose to ware 100% cashmere sweaters, chinos and shoes that complement the colour and they only look about 28! I’m not automatically assuming there’s anything detrimentally wrong with people who wear those items, but the one person in particular was totally out of order to me in there. Staring down his nose, wouldn’t move out of my way when I politely asked him…I felt the urge to jam a Maxi-Cosy car seat into his ribs!!
It was a bit of a pram haven in there, and the broachers that were with them offered little in the way of what they did. Eventually an assistant saw us struggling and came to offer us some advice. Thank god she did too. We spent time looking at one pram in particular UppaBaby it was called. Without the assistants help I probably would of managed to figure out about 3 percent of what it did. It was more complicated than LOST.
Kim had done a lot of research into Pram, which sort of put me to shame as the terminology was completely loosing me. There were genuinely times I thought the assistant was slipping into a different countries dialect – I had to keep looking at Kim, seeing her nodding stopped me from saying “sorry, can we stick to English please, I’m not familiar with colloquial Finnish” It was embarrassing as I felt out of my depth at this early stage.
We got the right one for us though I think and this is it:
http://www.uppababy.com/products/product.php?id=176
Reasons:
- Light weight – Kim isn’t too strong (by her own admission) and she could easily manage to put it in and out of the car.
- 4 wheels – we tried a few 3 wheel options, but they seemed really unstable when on one wheel (for going up curbs and putting onto the tube). Couldn’t really see the benefit of 3 wheels really, cornering wasn’t to great a difference, so I’m not sure what the benefit is.
- Good design – We liked the overall design. It wasn’t imposing, transformed better than Optimus Prime after a bath in WD40 and still retained an aesthetic quality we both liked.
We opted for Black too – we deliberated Red and Silver but both would take a lot of cleaning should/when the pram is covered in baby output.
The price was reasonable too when compared to the other big choices such as Bugaboo or Britax.
When we bought it I learnt from Kim that there is an age-old tradition where you aren’t supposed to have the pram in the house until the baby is born. There seems to be a lot of these floating around all of a sudden. Sadly she didn’t swallow my “it’s unlucky to not have an iPad in the house during the 3rd trimester” – sigh.
