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April 21, 2007
Baby Transport
So now you have a baby, that’s great, but you still need to get around. You receive a lot of recommendations from other parents: slings, harnesses, backpacks, buggies, car seats, bike seats, the variation is considerable. And you more or less have to try everything and probably will end up needing several different systems at one time or another and of course they are all expensive. And worth it.
For us by far the most useful has been the Baby Bjorn, the only drawback of which is that Talia insists on calling it the Bjorn Borg. One of our earliest what’s-the-right-way-to-raise-the-child disagreements focused on this device: I thought he was ready to be worn facing out, Talia thought he wouldn’t be able to breathe on the bike with the wind streaming in his face. We later discovered that by far the more important factor was the degree to which his legs interfered with our own as we pedaled, which is to say much less if he was facing you. But by then he had found the freedom of facing out and there was no going back.
He has now, at six months, outgrown his Bjorn and we’re migrating him to a backpack device instead. The downside is that on the back he is less likely to provoke screams from Japanese tourists than he did when riding proudly out front through the streets. Also, he loves pulling Talia’s hair and there’s little you can do to control him when he’s on your back. I just bought him his first bicycle seat, and soon he will be able to ride in an umbrella carriage (small, folds easily, can also be transported on the bike); the combination of the two should make the body-carrier unnecessary for many adventures. Stay tuned.
Posted by talia at April 21, 2007 3:14 PM