Today we went to Babies R Us intending to buy a baby gate and came out with a new stroller. :-D
I mentioned before that I'd been researching. Actually I had pretty much decided on one, based on specs, price, and reviews online. (Sidenote: whoever invented the customer review feature of shopping websites is a genius. I don't know how I'd buy anything without the ability to first find out what other people thought of it.) I figured we'd pick it up next month or so, but since we were already at BRU I did want to at least look at it, play around with it and compare it to some of the others they had.
Well, in the course of looking and playing, we noticed there was one on clearance. It's last year's model, but the differences are slight enough to be negligible. We took the little man for a test drive around the store, practiced folding and unfolding and lifting. Seemed like a winner. The clearance price was $30 off, plus we happened to have a $10 coupon from my wonderful mother-in-law, so we figured we might as well just go for it now. It came out to be under $100. All in all I'm feeling like we got an awesome deal. Woohoo!
I'll have to take a picture of John in his new ride once we've got it out of the box!
For those that care, the new stroller is a MetroLite by Graco. For the past 7 months we've been using our SafeSeat car seat with the SnugRider frame (both by Graco) and have been very pleased with the quality for the price. I picked the MetroLite because it has the features I wanted: 5-point harness, reclining seat, sun canopy, large basket, 40 pound weight limit, and weighs less than 20 pounds. From the testing in the store, it seems to be just as easy to push and steer as our SnugRider. It also can be used with our SafeSeat as a travel system... so yes, if I could go back in time, I'd probably tell myself in January to just go ahead and get the travel system. But, since back in January I knew nothing about strollers and had no idea what kind of features I was going to want, I'm glad we went the roundabout route. Now I just hope the new stroller lives up to all my excitement about it. :-)
And yeah... we really do need to pick up some baby gates. It turns out they are more expensive than we anticipated, so we need to go online and read some more reviews first. ;-)