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08/13/2004 Archived Entry: "olives and strollers"

Yesterday after Tabitha's class, she went to my mil's house as Tabitha wanted to spend a whole day with her before she went back to work. While she was there, Chris and I went to a late lunch at Olive Garden courtesy of my mom who had given us a gift certificate there for our anniversary last month. After lunch, we headed to Chicks and eventually Target looking for an air pump for our air mattresses that we plan to use while camping. They are both next to a Babies R' Us so we went in to look at strollers.
Now, apparenly even though it's only been 6 years, things have changed. You can't get a nice big deluxe stroller that doesn't come with a baby bucket (car seats). I don't like the buckets. People never seem to take their babies *out* of the bucket and that's not the position I want my kid's spine to grow. But we're resigned ourselves to the fact that if we want a nice stroller, it will come with a bucket. We'll just use it as our secondary car seat for when I go places with family or friends. But we don't plan to use it in the stoller itself. So we busied ourselves trying to figure out how strollers work nowadays. First order of business is getting the bucket off the stroller. Not an easy task. Those things have a trick to them which is good so people don't dump the babies out, but bad for us folks in the store without the benefit of the instructions. Eventually, we figured out how they all have an extra locking mechanism and things went much smoother after that.
The second feature that most of the have now is one handed fold up. I suppose it's easier, but again, not if you don't know what you're doing. We needed to be sure the strollers would fit in our trunk after they were folded considering we're one of the few people in the world with children who do not drive a mini-van or SUV. You can't fold the strollers unless the bucket is taken out and time and time again, we forgot this. On one particular model, I went to fold it before we took the bucket off and it collapsed and the bucket pitched forward- still attached at one place- and essentially I would have done irreparable damage to baby had one actually been in the seat. We quickly put that one away, because why take chances when we're going to be in sleep deprived stupors? We did eventually find one that we really liked although I'm still bummed that none of them compare to what we had with Tabitha.
Next we wandered by the bassinets. Now Tabitha's bassinet is one of the few things I actually kept because I really liked it. We were supposedly just walking by. And then I saw it. The most beautiful natural wood and cream colored bedding cradle I've ever seen. Oooh, the baby furniture lust hit me hard. Up until that point I'd only looked at what I consider necessities, so this was the first time I've allowed myself to really look at the non-essentials and I liked what I saw. Now I want to shop and it's time to buy some baby gear.

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