You’d think we were picking out our next car with how much research my wife did when picking out a stroller. This, of course, was back before we actually had the baby and were trying to figure which travel system to buy. If you’re not a parent and just along for the ride on this here blog, a travel system consists of a car seat, stroller and series of bases that you put in your car(s). The idea is that you can put the number of bases you need in various cars, that way you can drop your car seat right in, but you can also take the seat out and drop it into the stroller.

After lots of research, the missus wound up decided on Chicco, one of the bigger brands. Then the decision came down to which color scheme and pattern to get. The problem was that the pieces actually looked different in person than they did on the website. We had narrowed it down to a few different ones–I dismissed one because the yellow looked too much like urine and another because it was just too damn red (and I like red, so that’s saying something). If I’m reading the website correctly we eventually settled on the Miro scheme. It does have yellow, but after seeing it in person, it definitely didn’t look like pee, so they really do look different in person.

We’ve been using this travel system pretty much since Lucy was born in early May, so I’ve had a good deal of experience with it. She doesn’t seem to like the car seat very much, but I think that’s more a matter of her not liking to be confined than anything else. Once she’s in it and driving around, she falls right asleep. The base idea is really ingenious because you don’t have to spend time trying to install and uninstall the whole car seat every time you go anywhere (that would make me want to leave the house with Lucy even less than I already do, which isn’t often). My only problem with the set-up really is that you need to use two hands to get the car seat handle up after locking it down for the car ride and I don’t always have two hands ready for that. Twould be even better if it was voice activated.

The stroller’s great too. It handles well and actually has two different options for different terrains, which made me chuckle. Baby Offroading! But the real benefit of having such a bigass stroller was something I discovered the other day when the three of us went to the mall: you can use the stroller as a shopping cart and no one gets mad at you for taking it out of the store! My wife wound up carrying the baby in a Moby Wrap which works out very well for the two of them. Meanwhile, she put her purse in the cart and as we walked around and made purchases, I was able to toss them into the stroller and push that around instead of carrying everything. It might not look like the manliest thing in the world, but I’m not really worried about that. So, while I didn’t foresee this by any means, I’m a big fan of the stroller’s ability to act as my own personal pack mule in addition to being pretty good at hauling kids. Plus, it doesn’t look like pee, which is another plus.