We have a Cadillac. Well, not exactly. We have the Cadillac of strollers. It’s ginormous, like a Caddy. And it’s a smooooth ride, like a Caddy. Oh and it cost almost as much as a Caddy. At least in terms of strollers, ours is more on the Caddy-end of the price spectrum than, say, a Kia.
But there are a few differences between our stroller and a real Cadillac:
1) We won’t be using ours for years and years to come.
2) As it arrives in the box when you first buy it, it can only accommodate one passenger at a time.
3) Its main occupant doesn’t give a damn about keeping it nice and clean, so there are plenty of unknown foods and substances expertly smeared into much of the surface (along with a good amount of Cheerio and cookie crumbs in the crevices).
My husband and I were fortunate to have had this luxury baby stroller gifted to us. And we appreciated it thoroughly because we thought that we just had to have a high-end stroller for our newborn baby boy. We thought about safety (we could bulldoze through a crowd without him getting so much as an upset stomach from all the commotion), and about practicality, like the stroller being able to handle uneven, bumpy city sidewalks (which ours does. Once again, bulldozer.). We also considered other things, like the ability to store things under the stroller. This came in handy when we would go grocery shopping and we would use the stroller as our make-shift cart. But there are some things that we didn’t consider at the time:
1. When our son could even so much as cruise, he refused to sit in his stroller anymore. This resulted in him pushing his own stroller every time we left the house.
See this? That’s our son not sitting in his Caddy.
2. All of that awesome storage space on the bottom is now where my son puts all of his belongings whenever he gets a chance. And you never really know what you’re going to find in there. Last I looked, we had a bag of stickers, three tubes of sunscreen, a firetruck (a big firetruck), a dinosaur, two blankets, three sweatshirts, and a hat. When in doubt, check the stroller.
3. Now that we have another baby, our Caddy doesn’t get driven at all. We could spend the money to get the attachment so that two kids can fit in it, but it puts them in an awkward position, so that one child is basically sitting under his brother. Instead, we got a very sturdy—and free—hand-me-down double stroller. It’s a tank, but anything that carries two children simultaneously isn’t going to ride like a Ducati. And did I mention that it was free?
I realized recently that I’m not the only one out there who might have a bit of stroller regret. (I know that it was a gift, but we probably could have used that money toward the down payment on our house instead…) Blogger Gylisa Jayne recently took to Facebook to vent her frustrations with the high price tags of strollers. When her husband expressed interest in some of the trendier ones before their child was born, she went along with him to the store to see what was out there. Needless to say, she was shocked at what she found.
In her post she wrote:
I learnt that everyone else is either way richer than me, or it’s just normal for a pram to cost more than we’ve ever spent on a…CAR.
[…]
I read the specifications on those things, and apparently for a pram that costs the best part of a thousand pounds – it won’t change a nappy, drive itself, or be worth anything as an heirloom.
Pretty much. And if my Caddy did change a diaper or two, I might not be writing this today. I would be skipping gleefully around my house while my stroller handled all of the poop and pee that has now become a permanent part of my day.
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