What the hell has happened to baby strollers? What happened to the classic, classy, small-footprint utilitarian umbrella stroller?
Everywhere I go, it’s huge, ridiculous, oversized strollers. Molded plastic everywhere. I’ve seen some that **actually have SUV names branded on them **. The double wide strollers are the worst, though - take an already obnoxiously oversized stroller, then make it TWICE AS FUCKING WIDE so that it takes up TWICE AS MUCH FUCKING SPACE. I had to manoeuver around one today that was literally blocking the entire sidewalk as Mama Cow thundered along at approx .5 mph behind it.
Then I went into the post office, and before long THREE WOMEN came in pushing THREE DOUBLE-WIDE STROLLERS. I don’t know what fucking procreative drugs these yuppie brood queens are injecting into their ovaries through their feet, because EACH of them had two little babies in their double-wide strollers. (I don’t begrudge the babies; they’re really, really fucking cute and they’re innocent.) Now, our local post office has to be in violation of every OSHA and ADA guideline - the inside looks and feels like it was designed in an unholy midnight mass collaboration between H.R. Giger and M.C. Escher. These double-wide strollers pushed things to critical mass, just blocking everything - blocking the line that was already established, blocking people from being able to enter and exit the building, and so on. A few minutes later, one of the moms mis-piloted the baby barge and knocked over an entire display of packing materials. Nice!
What’s going on? Why? These strollers are ridiculous, they take up too much space, and they’re just the latest outgrowth of this yuppie-fueled entitlement mother-whore SUV society.
Yeah, I remember the good ole days with the smaller strollers. You know, with the small wheels that jolted and lurched your kid around till the milk in their belly was cottage cheese and wanting to escape. The kind where the wheels got caught on the smallest pebble. Plus, they provided no rain or snow protection if the weather turned shitty.
These modern day mother-whore types don’t know how good they have it.
When my nephew was a baby my brother and sister-in-law had a double carriage for the ONE nephew. It was such a pain to go anywhere with them. The reason they got the double was so they could put all this shit in the empty seat. The kid does not need 4 change of clothes, 20 diapers, 3 bottles, toys, several bottles of water for the adults and all this other shit just to go into Target for 20 minutes worth of shopping. Leave all that shit in the car damnit.
Holy christ, you want a stroller nightmare? Try going to a Disney park during the busy season and getting anywhere near the children’s attractions. Your ankles will be bloody before you can say “Dumbo Ride”.
My son is 1 year old and the wife is already asking when we can go to Disney. My answer is “not until he can walk through the park on his own”. There is no way I’m going to add to that mayhem.
As I mother and babysitter, can I post a FUCKING AMEN! to this rant?
Please, *find *me a smallish double or triple stroller! I’m begging you. I regularly watch 1 almost 3 year old, 1 2 year old and one almost 1 year old, and there’s another on the way in November. We’re all going to be housebound unless I can come up with some sort of conveyance for all of them. The almost 3 can walk about 8 blocks, the 2 year old about 4, but that’s about it, and at about the pace of a constipated turtle. The 1 year old can walk about 6 inches before he trips over dust and falls down.
It’s not the moms, really it’s not. It’s because the stroller manufacturers keep increasing the “Safety” ratings and think we all want a stroller the size of an Escalade.
I’m really, really hoping I’m wrong about this and sixteen Dopers will jump in with cites to the contrary. If there really are small multiple strollers out there, I’ll buy one so fast your heads’ll spin and I’ll pimp 'em to all the mothers I know!
While I understand those little strollers were crap, it seems to me we have gone way the other way now. It seems like such a sense of entitlement! But I am not a mom so what do I know.
I will take this opportunity to rant a little about my BIL & his wife who asked for, and received, a $700 stroller for their baby. $700 fucking dollars! I wanted to ask - how do poor people afford their babies? And two, count ‘em, two giant bassinets that turn into twin beds, one for each grandparents’ house. And all kinds of other shit. I love my niece dearly and want her to be spoiled but maybe you should get your own goddamn house before you ask for all of this rich shit?
I guess it just annoys me a bit. Yes, it’s the first grandchild. So everyone is anxious to buy. But there should be some sense. Do you really need a 3-way stroller? I know his wife is already getting a little sick of it, and doesn’t want to admit it.
Dittoing WhyNot here. I HATE these huge strollers. We have two strollers for my kid, and the main, full-size one (that could hold the infant seat when he was little) is the smallest stroller of that type that we could find. I HATE IT. I ended up wearing him in a sling everywhere for most of his first six months because I hated pulling that thing in and out of the car. Now, we use a smaller umbrella stroller everywhere - not much storage, but I don’t need to take the entire contents of his dresser on a walk or to the mall.
We’re planning on having another baby next year, and I desperately don’t want to get a double stroller. I don’t know what we WILL do, but I am dreading even thinking about a double stroller.
WhyNot, I’ve been told MacLaren or Combi doubles are smaller, but I’ll be damned if I see it.
I can’t help with the finding, since I’m many years out of the market, but I have some tips about what to look for:
Go for a tandem stroller, not a side-by-side. Store aisles and sidewalks aren’t made for anything that wide. However, make sure it will fit in your car. Mine did with about a 1/4" to spare.
Put the heavier kid in the back seat. The stroller will handle much better. When you have just one kid he should still go in the back seat because he’s likely to weigh more than whatever you stick up front.
Get one with the biggest front wheels you can find so it goes over FordPrefect pebbles.
I’m not sure if ours is SUV sized. It looks like this (on the left). We use it in leiu of the umbrella stroller on a number of occasions:
At the mall, where the extra storage is very convenient. Have you tried to carry a diaper bag and shopping bags while pushing a stroller? It aint easy, and you’ll end up bumping more people than if you could just focus on manuvering the slightly larger stroller.
Long trips, like Sea World or the zoo. It’s just easier.
Going on walks around the neighborhood. The biggun moves much better than the umbrella version (bigger wheels, easier to turn). Plus Junior can have her water in front of her and a shade over her head if needed.
That said, I can’t think of any time where I’ve noticably impeded anyone, nor have I ever been significantly bothered by these baby SUVs myself.
VCO3, can’t you substitute any number of human annoyances in your OP and get the same result? Surely other people get in your little way from time to time? Fatties, parents with lots of children, teens talking on cell phones, people who don’t know where they’re going, etc.
It’s probably a Travel System, where the carseat (matching, natch) that the infant starts out in (the kind with the arching handle which presumably you’re supposed to carry the kid around in, but which weighs about 500 pounds and digs into your elbow so you end up swinging the kid around with a stiff arm and wrecking your shoulder in the process) anyway, that “small” carseat clips into the stroller - sorry, Travel System. This has the slight advantage of you not having to wrestle a sleeping baby out of the carseat into the stroller if the kid conks out on the way to Target.
Once the tot outgrows that carseat (at 20 pounds or 1 year), then you use the stroller alone, either as a lay-down stroller (we used to call 'em “carriages”) or a sit-up stroller. Most have some amount of adjustable recline in between. In the highest-end models, the pushbar of the stroller will flip from one side to the other, so you can push with baby facing you or facing away from you. Unfortunately, most strollers with this option don’t have steerable wheels on all four corners, so one way or another (usually with baby facing you), you end up with a rear-wheel drive stroller, increasing the ankle-whacking odds considerably because your steering goes to shit.
Slacker, we have an almost identical Graco stroller (through freecycle), and it’s consistently the SMALLEST one I see around. There are a few exceptions I always covet that turn out to be European or Mexican grey market items.
