We weren’t going to get a double stroller, figuring we could just get the older kid to walk or we’d carry him a little. Some relatives wanted to chip in and get us one though, so we gave in and requested the Graco DuoGlider, since we are originally city folk and we hated the amount of sidewalk space the side by side strollers take up.
The tandem ain’t perfect, but I’m really glad we got it. There’s nothing like having a place for a 5 year old tired person to sit when he weighs 50 lbs and the grown ups are too tired to carry him. They take turns choosing which seat to be in–apparently there are advantages to the back seat that I didn’t know about, and some days it’s the place to sit.
Kelty backpacks are awesome, but unless you like to backpack, you can’t carry your kid for too long because kid + backpack = ton. Plus the view from the sidewalk/mall isn’t nearly as nice as, say, from the Canadian Rockies, and if you’re working that hard, damn it, you should have something pretty to look at.
Regarding the OP: After seeing these horrible strollers, I really don’t get the issue. Keep the strollers, cram the cell phones and I’m happy. I can honestly say at the age of 36 no one has ever bothered me with their stroller choice.
Fuck you. FUCK YOU. Someone has twins and you get to dub them yuppie brood queens who take infertility drugs.
As pointed out by others, your loathing of children, mothers and babies is astonishing and consistent. Fine and dandy, you can say as you wish. Just as we can.
Dick.
As for the OP, ignoring for the moment the disgusting trend in baby-loathing, I have two kids 16 months apart. I got a front-to-back double stroller JUST because I hate how much room even the old-style slender-tubed side by side strollers take up. Also, it is possible to pull the front-to-back stroller up the steps to the subway platform with help, or even alone if need be. A side by side would have been impossible.
I did it out of manners and a sense of ergonomics.
Times change. Now the 17 year old drive the 15 1/2 year old around town… :smack:
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand (well, unless you count random, here and there comments) but I sorta like VCO3. Sure some of his topics turn into minor trainwrecks but they’re usually amusing and harmless trainwrecks. But I’ve seen a lot of cases where he was right (as someone else mentioned in here) and at least he makes his pits so amusing to read. It’s like every time I see a VCO3 pit thread I click on it. I can’t help myself. I just imagine a grown man on the other end SO OUTRAGED over something and having no other place to get his thoughts out and vent but on here. And you know that his outrage will stem from something that happened to him that day.
I think he’d be an interesting person to know in real life. Never a dull moment and that sort of thing. Someone you could talk to about anything and you know he’d have an opinion about it. I don’t think that’s really a bad thing, per se.
I don’t really know why I made this post. It has nothing to do with the topic, but it’s just something that was on my mind and has been for awhile.
I feel better now for getting it out. Almost like a nice laxative working on your system.
And what do you suggest women who have more than two little ones do? Yes, yes, I RE a. Lize that there are the “stacked” ones. So what? Every single woman should have to get a copy cat stroller because you are too clumsy-footed to get around, or too tongue-tied and self-righteous to simply say “excuse me”?
Not to mention, as someone else posted (better and funnier than I), the old strollers were CRAP! I bought my daughter a wonderful stroller, (not doublewide, but if she’d had twins, you betcher butt I would have!) a wonderful smooth ride for the little one. Man! I wish they’d had the nice ones when she was little.
Actually, judging by your previous threads you know precisely fuck all. Sorry, I should say literally fuck all. I dare say that if the in-line buggies where more common you’d just be whining about how long these things are.
The main point here is this. No-one gives a flying fuck what you do or do not “buy”. Side by side strollers are a good design for parents with two small children, so many people will continue to buy them.
Fortunately most parents with these inconvenience no-one, so all is good. Of course, whiny little twunt that you are, you will continue to look for reasons to be offended by them, which will serve in your own tiny little mind as affirmation of your prejudices. I eagerly await for your net rant about whichever prejudice you develop next - “why is it that black babies in side by side pushchairs are noisier than white babies too” perhaps? I leave that to your fertile little neurotic mind.
To date, I have had no need of double strollers. The day I do, I can assure you I will try to find the widest, most overbuilt version I can, just in the hope that somewhere in my neck of the woods there are similar idiots to you that I can offend.
Leaving aside whether the OP is an ass or not (where this thread seems to be headed) I am neither clumsy footed or incapable of saying “excuse me” but I was hit by a stroller this week and it hurt.
I didn’t even see the person coming. I couldn’t, because I was waiting for the light and had my back turned to her when she plowed into me with her stroller. She didn’t even apologize, too busy talking on her cell phone.
It’s less the size of the stroller than a misunderstanding that the earth, sun, stars and moon don’t revolve around certain people and their “travel systems.”
Today, I was walking my dog in the park near me, where I saw a woman chatting on her cell phone, pushing her children in a twin jogging stroller along a bike path. This caused cyclists to swerve into the jogging lane or into the traffic lanes. Is that fair?
I work for a bookstore. On some days, you can barely move in the children’s department because of the strollers. The parents or nannies often aren’t buying anything. Instead, they’re letting their children destroy the books and letting their strollers block the aisles so it takes twice as long to retrieve a book for someone who actually wants to purchase something. Is that fair?
One branch of the chain I work for, decided to ask people to park their strollers in a particular section of the store so that aisles wouldn’t be so crowded and everyone would have a chance to move around more freely. There was a large outcry about this with some people saying it was an “attack on motherhood.”
Is that fair?
On my way to work, I have to pass two huge construction sites. This has resulted in halving the sidewalk space. Parents,nannies and their strollers still congregate and chat blocking the entrances/exits to the sidewalks for everyone else. Is that fair? And no, they don’t automatically move when I say “excuse me.”
In the scheme of things, these are miniscule grievances but I sometimes think they are symptoms of how insular and selfish people have become (or maybe always were, it just took me a while to notice).
Also, I’m a twin and my mom had a huge carriage to wheel us around. She has said on a couple of occasions how suprised she is by people who take large strollers into crowded areas. She said she wouldn’t have thought of doing something similar when she had the carriage. It was incovenient both for her navigation-wise and she didn’t want to disrupt other people doing whatever they needed to do.
Your experiences are not tied to the size of strollers. In fact, they’re not really tied to strollers at all. Your experiences are all about a certain class of people who feel that reproducing gives them the right to inconvenience anyone, at any time, for any reason. And I dare not even say they should go get fucked, because if they do, they might pop out another kid!
I could get behind a pitting of these idiots (and have done so in the past, whether here or in MPSIMS, I can’t recall). But it ain’t about the strollers. It’s about morons with overblown senses of entitlement.
These are more what I was thinking of when I gave an AMEN to the OP, especially the first one. I have a lot more sympathy and slack to give to parents of close-togethers or multiples, but I just get a little :dubious: when my s-i-l, mother of one, pulls out the double stroller for a day at the zoo. No, your kid doesn’t need all that crap! Really, there are decently sized bags and bins on small strollers. For a whole day with the two year old, I’ll bring 5 diapers (and use 3), a dozen wipes in a plastic bag, 1 sippy cup to be filled with municipal water or water from my water bottle, 1 bib, 1 toddler fork and 1 toddler spoon in case we go out to eat, 1 packet of peanut butter crackers, 1 Larabar, 1 snack sized bag of goldfish. She starts the excursion munching on a slice of cheese. Even if we get stuck in the middle of the woods with no source of food, that’s all she needs to eat in one day. Nothing needs to be ‘frigerated or ice packed. It all fits into my purse, for goodness’ sake! We only use diaper bags for overnights.
This should be saved for trips to the grocery store, otherwise it just collects moldy sippy cups and dirty bibs for weeks on end. (This is probably the most common model I see around here these days. Nice stroller, but it does take up more than its fair share of real estate on a city sidewalk, and it’s a bitch to steer 'cause the weight is up front.)
Looking through Amazon, it appears that the trend this year is for more fabric and less bulbous rounded plastic, for which I’m grateful, as well as photo angles that make things appear smaller. This doesn’t look all that bad, but a friend of mine has it, and it will not fit into my Saturn hatchback - it fills most of the back of her RAV 4. For a single kid.
So that’s where my bitching comes from - as a parent trying to deal with lugging (especially down the stairs), storing (where do y’all keep these huge things when you’re at home?) and steering the behemoths that have been popular for the last few years.
Ah. This one I can answer! When mudgirl was but a wee bairn, she had a large-ish stroller. Of course, as soon as she was big enough to sit up properly, we used the umbrella stroller for all but extended outings, when we felt she might need to lie down in her stroller to nap. Anyway, we kept hers on the (covered) porch, secured with a bicycle lock. Wouldn’t work for an apt. dweller, but it worked for us.
You know what’s funny? One of these days, young VC03 will get married and have kids. And I betchya dollars to donuts when he does have a wife and kids, these rants are going to go 180 degrees the other way.
“Goddamn Jerks Who Won’t Get Out Of the Way of My Pregnant Wife”
“Goddamn Idiots Who Get In The Way of My Stroller”
In the hall closet/foyer. We don’t have a big space there, but the stroller once folded up fits just nicely in the corner right beside the door.
I always preferred the larger stroller when out for the day or out shopping because it was easier to carry everything we had (though it wasn’t a lot, unless we’d, say, gone to the zoo and packed a lunch) or a handy place to hold things instead of dealing with a grocery cart and a stroller. I also preferred it because it was easier to push through slush and snow, as well as being the right height for me. Those umbrella strollers? My back is killed me after a few minutes, and the extenders needed to make the handle the right height would’ve cost more than the stroller itself (now he can walk on his own quite well, so we only need the umbrella if I know it will be a long day for him to be on his feet).
I always tried to be considerate about where my stroller was and wasn’t. The people who just push them around willy-nilly, without regard to people around them are just oblivious idiots. The strollers aren’t the problem, it’s the people. They’re the same idiots who push grocery carts into your heels, stop at the top of escalators or in front of elevators and in open doorways. Not that there weren’t times I wanted to ram people, but I did my best to avoid it.
I have the Quattro Tour that WhyNot linked to.
I absolutely agree that it’s on the big side.
However, that’s the only problem I’ve found with it. The ability to snap her car seat into it when she was tiny was a huge bonus. We’ve only just started without the car seat, and she’s 7 1/2 months now. I can pack her diaper bag, my jacket and my purse in the bottom without a problem.
It’s great for walking to the grocery store, as I can bring back enough stuff for a week.
The big wheels worked well in the snow and slush.
I have an umbrella stroller, but it hurts my back to push, and I’m not that tall! I can’t even imagine how it must bug you Flutterby.
I occasionally run into things with it (stupid baby stores that you can’t get strollers into - who came up with that?) but I’ve never hit a person.
I think it also depends where you are. All my mom friends agree that our strollers are annoying behemoths - but we’ve all got them. You really don’t see anything particularly small here - probably because of the need to use them in the snow and cold.
I’ve finally figured out the disconnect with this attitude - when people have a baby, they start thinking they’re special (cult of the child and all that). What they don’t realize is that they are only special to that child, not to anyone else in society.
I’ll see your big strollers and raise you this one
I used a similar one for both little flodnaks (same stroller, in fact) - not as pricey as that model, that was just the first brand name that came to mind. It was comfortable for the wee one and practical for the adult pushing it, and frankly that’s all I considered when I bought it. It’s not at all hard to be courteous and safe with one of those; they’re as common as dirt here in Troll Country.
We had an umbrella stroller, too, and I hated it hated it HATED IT. Damn thing got hung up on every crack in the sidewalk. But it had its uses, of course.
The incident that valleyofthedolls is talking about induced outrage because the intial reports were saying that the bookstore in question banned all strollers on their property. I think when the facts came out (they were just requiring them to be parked in a specific location), the hullabaloo died down.
We keep ours in the trunk of our car. We live in a 650 sq ft apartment, with four people. Our car is bigger than our house .
My brother and I are a year apart and Mom used a one in front of the other carriage. That rat bastard used to get out on his own and then I’d be thrown out by the change in weight balance. Not on purpose my butt.
When mudgirl was but a wee bairn, she had a large-ish stroller. Of course, as soon as she was big enough to sit up properly, we used the umbrella stroller for all but extended outings, when we felt she might need to lie down in her stroller to nap. Anyway, we kept hers on the (covered) porch, secured with a bicycle lock. Wouldn’t work for an apt. dweller, but it worked for us.
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