Branded by experience.

You would think wouldn't you that by the the time you have your third child you are no longer excited or impressed by things like prams? Well in our case you'd be totally wrong!

Every parent wants the perfect prams for them and their child but in reality it does not exist. I've found it difficult to balance conflicting needs, I don't drive so need something easy & light but am unwilling to compromise on the child's comfort and hate the facing away from me. This time we settled on a lovely silvercross system, British company (well used to be) high quality, comfy and adaptable and a buzz chassis alone to use as a travel system when the need arose.

What we did not foresee was our newborn daughter suffering from severe reflux and it being exacerbated by both these items. The silvercross carrycot is flat unless you use it in pushchair mode but then the over the shoulder harness seems to be a problem for her. The angle of the car seat is not upright enough to help either so every trip out becomes an opera of screaming and vomiting. However we were totally stuck as the market leader (probably) which encompasses all the features we needed is extremely pricey. Although I'm a massive ebay fan its not really possible to sell the car seat and pram you are using before you have an alternative. So it was Grandma to the rescue she kindly stepped in to buy us the new system while we sell the 'old' stuff to pay for the upgrade.

So you can see a sleepy chilled infant courtesy of Grandma, saviour of the day!

Moments like these...

Well, I had hoped to be showcasing our lovely new shinny pram and writing about all its lovely features and comforts for the little one who will be joining us in December but sadly everything has gone a bit pear shaped this week! After much deliberation we decided we had chosen too early and based our choice only on what we hadn't had for the other 2 (a large impractical springy status symbol with a designer badge) and promptly went and bought that. We (I) realised since that when its throwing it down or snowing and your picking your middle child up from nursery you won't care what pram you are pushing so long as 1) your youngest is warm & dry, 2) you can steer it home quickly. So our choice of the mamas & papas ultima only met half of the criteria for sensible winter pram.

Hot on the heels of this realisation a new mamas & papas brochure landed on our door step and we saw they sell a model which will face the parent, and fold small and has a nice separate carrycot. We contacted customer services & they told us yes we could exchange as long it our original was in salable condition. So we trotted off home with our new mamas and papas switch 3in1 in prim to slot it altogether and stroke it basically!

However, once put together it became obvious this is not a well design pram. The hood does not recline it goes only half way down so it would be difficult to slot my newborn into the pram while keeping an eye on 2 other children. The apron does not actually attach to the hood (or it didn't on our model) so you get the impression it would blow off with a gust of wind. The hood continually slouches down like a lazy teenager and impacts of the length of the zip on rain cover leaving half the carrycot exposed to the rain.

After much hand wringing we called customer services again and handed the pram back and to our massive surprise got a refund (even without the box which we binned straight away!). So we skipped down to another pram shop only to find our next choice is not in stock, never fear, candidate number 3 should be here on Thursday all being well, am so looking forward to ripping it open.......


Processing preset will be available on the other blog this week...