Stroller Hi-jinks

It has started…the assembly of baby products. I have now officially had my first taste of what it is like to put together necessary baby equipment.

At our first shower, we received an umbrella stroller. Well, since it was all nicely compact, we decided not to unbind it so that we could get it home. Monday night, my mother and I snapped the ties holding it together. Two sets of wheels promptly fell off. At first, I thought I had broken something. That turned out not to be the case. Apparently it is common for strollers to come with only two or none of the wheels attached (as I found out later). So, we managed to put on the wheels and roll around the nursery with it. Well, since getting the umbrella stroller working took almost no time at all, I wanted to tackle the travel system.

For those of you unfamiliar with a travel system, this is a rather large stroller which allows for the infant carrier to sit in it comfortably for the first few months. Then the large stroller can be used up until the child’s toddler years, or 40 lbs or so. Based on past experience, I thought this would be a piece of cake and not take long at all. Boy, was I wrong. We couldn’t even get the stupid thing out of the box My mom and I had to flip the box on it’s side and lift the bottom of it while I attempted to pull the system out of the box. We finally succeeded, only then I was trapped under the infant carrier unable to move. It was quite hysterical. After doing away with the plastic wrap and ties (which resulted in more wheels falling off, all of them to be exact) we dug out the instruction booklet. Yes, we read and attempted to follow instructions, it was a disaster! I guess that is what we get for trying to follow directions. In the booklet, it showed what parts were included in the box. We were missing a piece. We searched all over until we figured out that it was already attached to the stroller. Go us

After finding the not-so-lost piece, we moved on to the next step. Mom kept asking about a basket and if there were snaps. I couldn’t figure out why she was so consumed with snaps until I looked at the book. Apparently, they had tried to make things really easy to understand and kept printing the word “Snap” in a little bubble to demonstrate how to attach the basket under the stroller. Again, it was already attached so I’m not really sure why they felt they needed to reiterate this point. Moving on, we finally got to the wheels. Here is where the hammer comes in. “Hammer?” you ask. We did too. We just couldn’t understand why you would need a hammer to put together a stroller. So there we were, myself, my mother, the two dogs, a partially put together travel system, a hammer, and we were fresh out of engineers. (For those of you who don’t know, Jonathan is in Canada this week. But that’s another story.) We couldn’t believe that we had gotten that far along in the assembly and now needed an engineer.

Being the optmist that I am, I figured that we didn’t need an engineer. Afterall, the booklet did not say we needed one I somehow managed to convince my mother that we could do it; we had gotten this far. I knew Jonathan would not be happy to come home and find the travel system partially put together and taking up our living room. So we began putting on the wheels and came to the hammer part. Well, I tried and failed miserably to take care of the hammering part. My mother, however, had much more success than I did. Let it just be said that under no circumstances should I be allowed to hammer things, ever!

After succesfully attaching all the wheels, I thought we were home-free. Wrong again! One of the last things to do was to put the parental cupholder on the stroller frame. Again, this almost proved to be too much for us. We could get one side to snap on, but not the other. We tried everything. Mom didn’t want to force it and I was ready for this stupid thing to be put together already! We continued on and finally managed to gather up enough brute strength to force the stupid piece on. Then we came to the foot rest for the stroller. See the previous 6 sentences and just substitute the foot rest for the cupholder, that’s how things went. At last we managed to get it all together. And what did I do once the stroller was completely assembled? I proceeded to chase the dogs around the house with the new baby stroller They need to get use to it right? It was very satisfying

Conclusion drawn from assembling the travel system: my mother and I are equal to one engineer!

Popularity: 2% [?]