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When we were pregnant for the first time, we were confronted with the daunting task that all fresh parents must face: product research.

Trying desperately to figure out what was needed at all — and then which product in that category to buy.

The stroller, of course, was one of the big ones.

We had friends who got pregnant a couple of months ahead of us, and they were meticulous researchers and relentless planners. Logistics, one might say, was their love language.

True to form, they shared that they had gone to the Nordstrom nearby, where there was a whole showroom of strollers and you could even “test drive” them across different types of terrain.

I mean. The service!

We went there too. And we went to Target. And we researched online.

To say that we were lost and had no idea where to even start is to say nothing at all.

But I had this idea that I’d be the kind of mom who went on walks often with her baby.

And when I thought about the roads in the park we were going to be living close to and all the potholes and the inroads made by tree roots, I knew I needed a stroller that could take a hit with some grace.

Because I thought I’d be out walking all the time… (So naive!)

My husband was adamant that the stroller had to have rubber wheels — not plastic — and that it needed good suspension.

At the time, these felt like very important considerations.

But there’s something funny about choosing baby products before you’ve ever had an actual baby.

You’re trying to optimize for a life you’ve never lived.

You’re imagining the parent you’re going to be. The places you’ll go. The routines you’ll have. The things that will matter — potentially years down the line. (Some highly admirable planner-type parents even think about a stroller that can expand or be converted to accommodate two babies while they’re still waiting for their first baby to arrive.)

It’s hard to anticipate how your life will change with your first baby and prepare for it adequately.

Still, you try.

And then the baby arrives.

And approximately six months later, you are evaluating products based on criteria like:

Can I open this with one hand?

Can I throw this into the trunk without rearranging the entire car?

Can I clean vomit, poop, and endless milk spills out of it?

Will my child actually tolerate being placed inside it?

And, perhaps most importantly:

How annoying is this thing going to be when I am already annoyed?

For me, buying a big-ticket item always looks roughly the same: 33 tabs open and two to three hours set aside exclusively for the task of reviewing them, so that I can give the decision the analysis paralysis it deserves.

The search for the perfect first-baby stroller was no different.

I read an absurd number of reviews written by various parenting blogs. I watched YouTube videos made by fellow parents. I compared features. I compared wheels. I compared suspensions.

And because I had never actually used a stroller, every feature sounded potentially critical.

Maybe the size of the under-seat basket was going to determine whether I thrived or failed as a mother.

Maybe one-handed folding was the single feature standing between me and complete logistical collapse.

I had no idea.

So naturally, I researched harder.

One of the first things I learned was that some strollers are stand-alone strollers, while others are part of what’s known as a “travel system.”

A travel system usually means that the stroller is designed to work with a specific infant car seat. You can take your baby out of the car while they’re still in the car seat and click the car seat directly onto the stroller frame.

Very convenient. Very elegant. Very “look at me, I have figured out life with a baby!”

In that configuration, the car seat basically becomes the part of the stroller that holds the baby.

Then, once the baby is older — or whenever you don’t want to use the car seat — the stroller usually has a separate seat attachment that clicks onto the same frame.

This was all new information to me at the time.

Anyway, while this whole car-seat-clicks-directly-into-the-stroller situation is terribly convenient, there was another wrinkle that became very important to me once the baby actually arrived:

Car seats are for car travel. They are not meant to be your baby’s regular sleeping spot once you get wherever you’re going. One of the concerns (I believe this applies more to younger babies) is that a baby’s head can fall forward into a position that compromises their airway — and there is at least one real-world case that I read about where unsafe positioning has had devastating consequences.

As an already anxious person who had a difficult birth and felt like we made it out of the NICU through the sheer grace of God, needless to say, I was very concerned about positioning my baby’s head and neck just right.

I would watch it like a hawk and obsessively check, tweak, and verify that his neck was okay any time my baby was in the car seat — whether we were in the car or outside of it.

For walks and outings, we often preferred to take our baby out of the car seat and put him into the regular stroller seat so that we didn’t have to worry about this.

So this whole car-seat-clicks-right-into-your-stroller feature of the travel system had limited benefit for us personally.

Until we went on a trip by plane with our baby.

When you fly with babies, you can generally check a stroller and car seat for free. And when we traveled, we needed both.

Our airport configuration became:

And off we went.

It meant we could cruise through the airport with the baby and all of these enormous pieces of baby equipment consolidated into one relatively manageable contraption.

Otherwise, imagine having your stroller AND carrying a car seat that doesn’t attach to it separately! If you wanted to use the car seat onboard, that is — otherwise, you could of course just check it at the check-in counter.

Then, when we got to the gate, we’d take everything apart. The regular stroller seat would go back onto the stroller, the car seat would come off, and we could gate-check both pieces separately for free.

This was a lifesaver.

Anyway, for our first stroller, we landed on the Chicco Corso LE Modular Travel System with the KeyFit 35 car seat.

We chose the luxury-hinting light-grey-and-black palette called “Veranda.”

We liked the accent of the tan faux leather on the handle.

My husband delighted in the rubber wheels and suspension.

We felt like we had done our due diligence and had justifiably spent $600 on a quality product.

This stroller was for one baby. At the time, we decided not to try to solve the question of what we would do stroller-wise once we had a second child.

That was a problem for Future Us.

For a long time after our second baby arrived, we actually managed to avoid buying a double stroller altogether.

Our solution was a toddler bike with one of those adult steering handles attached to the back.

This thing was a HUGE parenting hack.

We had seen another family using one while we were out in an affluent neighborhood of San Jose, and our immediate reaction was: wow, is that cool or what?

The kid looked like he was having a blast riding a little bike, but the parent still had complete control over the speed and trajectory.

We looked that one up and found it online retailing for something like $300.

We promptly went on Amazon and found an $80 alternative that looked and functioned pretty similarly.

Our son absolutely loved it! And it worked great!

It also meant that for normal life around town, we could keep using the perfectly good single stroller we already had for the new baby.

For basically every outing — whether we were leaving straight from our house or driving somewhere first — we brought the stroller and the push bike.

It helped that the push bike folded and disassembled enough to fit into the trunk along with the stroller.

And that worked so well for us that we had absolutely no reason to revisit the stroller situation.

We did not want to research a stroller that held two kids.

It wasn’t until we were getting ready to fly to Ireland for a family wedding that we finally thought: okay, this setup is not going to work for the trip.

It’s too bulky. We don’t want to bring two whole things if there’s one thing that can do the job.

So we went shopping for a double stroller.

You know where we went? To the internet with 33 product-comparison tabs?

No. Pshhh, we weren’t rookies anymore!

By then, we had learned the ways of the wise, been-there-done-that parents.

We went to Once Upon a Child, a second-hand children’s store.

We looked around for a quick minute and found a couple of viable options. The one that really grabbed our attention was the Chicco Bravo something-or-other.

(Lol. Note the difference in my attention to the exact model name of the stroller for the first baby versus the stroller for the second baby.)

Because this stroller was made by the same manufacturer as our Chicco KeyFit 35 car seat, it was compatible with our car seat too!

This was a huge win.

We were in and out of the store in maybe 20 minutes total and walked out very happy with our used and visibly bruised double stroller for $60.

It definitely helped that the person working there pointed out that the Chicco KeyFit 35 clicked right into the Bravo. Otherwise, we probably would have had to spend more time standing there looking up the narrowed-down options online.

But yeah, that was it.

No 33 tabs, no YouTube videos, no wheel-composition or suspension analysis.

Some people absolutely love thrift shopping.

They seek out thrift stores, browse for hours, and derive joy from finding hidden gems.

I have never been one of those people.

I have to confess that I enjoy new, shiny, previously un-owned things.

And for a long time, I especially felt that way about baby stuff.

Second-hand toys, in particular, gave me the ick.

What do you mean some child — or possibly several children — rubbed their germy little hands all over this thing and then it eventually made its way into a resale store in some unknown state of cleanliness?

Did anyone wipe it down during that chain of custody?

Anyway.

I have come around.

Gradually, albeit, but I have.

Mostly because of price. Lol.

I mean, $600 versus $60 has a way of expanding your worldview.

But also because I eventually realized how little use some things actually get with a baby. Before you know it, you need a onesie one size larger, or your kid has completely lost interest in a toy that seemed indispensable three weeks ago.

There is still about 90% of the mileage left in that thing.

So you bring it to a store in hopes that someone else gets to squeeze the rest of the juice out of it.

By the time we found that used double stroller for $60, I was willing to overlook the fact that it was visibly bruised and had clearly lived a life before us.

Obviously, the first thing I did when we got it home was give it a thorough scrub-down and machine-wash every fabric piece I could remove.

(And thank God modern strollers are often designed so that you actually can take the fabric pieces off and wash them.)

Some of the stains never did come out.

And you know what?

I am okay with that.

Because I paid $60 for this thing and it was a huge parenting win.

Anybody giving me side-eye about the giant stain on my two-baby stroller better recognize that they are looking at a mastermind in money-saving.

Now that I’ve actually owned and used a couple of strollers, here are a few conclusions I have reached.

Our first, fancy stroller did not come with cupholders.

I do not know why.

Perhaps building in cupholders interfered with the chic high-end aesthetic.

We ended up buying attachable cupholders on Amazon.

Twice.

Third-party stroller cupholders are easy to find, and they make all kinds of universal ones now that clamp onto basically anything.

The problem is: they break.

Especially, as we learned, if you leave them attached when you travel by plane.

Your stroller gets folded up, tossed around, loaded into the cargo hold, and somewhere along that journey your little aftermarket cupholder gets snapped clean off.

So, in retrospect, not having built-in cupholders was a rookie move on our part.

Because let me tell you: as an exhausted parent, pushing around one or two children who are almost certainly complaining about something, there may be very little about that outing that is specifically designed for your enjoyment.

But you know what you do have?

Your iced coffee.

Your Diet Coke.

Your sparkling water.

Your emotional-support beverage of choice.

(Sometimes for me this was a rich peanut-butter-and-banana protein shake with lots of satisfaction and relatively little guilt.)

Do not deprive yourself of this.

Get the stroller with the cupholders.

Our second stroller?

Boom!

Two giant-ass built-in cupholders.

One for me.

One for my husband.

We are set for life!

When shit gets tough on the walk, we each have a beverage to turn to.

This one seems obvious.

But here is the spoiler you may not be anticipating:

You are not just going to put the diaper bag in there, along with whatever other things you decide to bring.

You are going to put your toddler’s bike in there.

And their scooter.

And other things they insist on bringing against your pleading.

Because when they say, “I’ll ride my bike!” — or scooter, or whatever — do not be fooled.

At some point they will inevitably announce that they no longer wish to bike, scoot, walk, or participate in locomotion of any kind.

They will want to be carried.

Or rolled.

That’s when you will somehow become responsible for getting both the child and their abandoned transport of choice back to your car.

And when they say they want to carry their backpack or their inconsiderately oversized stuffed animal, guess what?

You will ultimately have to find a way to lug all of that back home or to the car too.

All of that shit has to fit in there — along with the diaper bag.

Make sure that sucka’s big.

When using the stroller with our infant car seat, the baby was in plain view, which was great. However, once she got old enough to sit unassisted, this model — when used without the car seat — has the younger baby sitting in the front, away from the parent, facing forward, and the toddler sitting behind her, closer to the parent, on a small plastic seat.

The plastic seat had no cushioning, which was a bummer, but the cool thing was that it folded up. This way, your toddler could stand, hold onto special handles, and ride like he was on the back of a chariot.

I figured my toddler would love this — and he did!

We bought the stroller when my second baby was already 11 months old, so she was perfectly capable of sitting upright in the front seat on her own.

But in retrospect — and especially if she had been younger — I think I would have preferred the opposite configuration.

I’d want the baby closest to me, facing me.

It’s the baby I’d want to keep a close eye on. Especially if they’re eating something.

Meanwhile, the older kid is much more independent and is also the one who’s more interested in what’s happening out in the world.

Put that kid in the front.

Let them face outward.

Let them observe traffic, dogs, construction equipment, squirrels, whatever.

So if I were buying a double stroller again from scratch, that is probably one thing I’d do differently.

That being said, in this particular stroller, when my girl was a baby in her car seat, she was facing me when clicked into the stroller. Overall here are the different configs they’ve been in in the stroller:

But ultimately?

Price, availability, and compatibility with the car seat we already owned made this particular stroller a no-brainer for us.

And when I say “availability,” I mean:

Was it physically sitting there at Once Upon a Child on the day we walked in determined to buy one?

Because by then, we had learned something.

Solving the problem quickly was sometimes just as valuable — if not more valuable — than spending several days analyzing every possible option in order to solve the problem correctly.

That was a very different mindset from where we started.

This is probably what I would say to myself if I could travel back in time:

“The wheels don’t matter that much. Because guess what, you sweet summer child of a silly bissssshhh? Spoiler alert: you’re not going to be getting out of the house all that much!”

All those walks I thought I was going to take?

Yes, I took a couple of them.

But did I walk so much that I needed to worry about wearing out the plastic wheels?

Lol.

No.

Do not worry about the damn wheels so much.

You are going to have many, many other things to worry about. Trust me.

And honestly, take that lesson and apply it to a lot of other seemingly important things you’re researching before your first baby arrives.

Some of them really will matter.

Some of them absolutely will not.

And you probably won’t know which is which until you’re actually living it.

So where are we today with the stroller situation?

We still use both strollers.

Sometimes I take just my younger baby on a walk and use the original single stroller.

Other times, when we all walk to the park, we bring my three-year-old’s scooter and the double stroller.

He starts out riding the scooter with either me or my husband jogging alongside him to keep him safe. Meanwhile, the other parent is leisurely pushing the stroller several yards behind.

And then, inevitably, my three-year-old gets tired, climbs into the toddler seat — or, to be honest, more often onto his dad’s shoulders, lol — and the scooter gets shoved into the giant basket underneath.

We have fun, though - and you can find us in many different “configurations:”

Anyway, those are our stroller experiences: a little reflection on how far we’ve come, plus hopefully enough practical tips in here to make all of this useful for ya.

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