Travel System Chaos!

It was time to start shopping for the much-needed car seat and travel system. Reasonably simple, I thought. Shouldn’t be too much hardship. Of course, the minute you start thinking that, is the minute you start to realise it will be anything except that.
We go to the a store and there’s car seats in abundance – all different sizes - some with metal bars, some with funny looking straps, some with well-padded arm rests. It’s all a bit overwhelming. We make our way to the travel system section where there’s a whole host of well-intended buggies and prams designed with all sorts of features I didn’t realise I needed to get my head around. It takes us a good 20 minutes to look at them all, until we decide on a short-list and wait to speak to an assistant - both of whom are already engaged with other customers. Noticing the café on the other side, I realise, this is a place where parents come, potentially, for a good few hours and is not going to be a quick in-and-out shop. In fact, it’s going to take all of my concentration. They really could do with a few seats in this section of the store, I think, tiredly.

After seeing a demonstration of one particular system, we agree to get the car seat tested in our car. The guy straps in the car seat, tightening the seat belts and then, without warning, balls his fist up and starts hurling it into the car seat, several times over. He takes a deep breath, before punching it a couple more times. The car seat jumps and I, with a short breath of surprise, suddenly get an awful picture in my head of our baby sitting in that seat. The assistant looks up at us. “Doesn’t look like the car seat is going to hold tightly enough with the seatbelts in your car, unfortunately. The straps are a bit too long, so it wouldn’t be safe enough.”
What on earth are we going to do?

“What you’ll need is a seat with an isofix base,” he explains. “They are metal bars that attach into your car and they’re safer. Unfortunately that means you will have to buy a separate isofix base for the car seat.”

Hubby and I look at each other in bewilderment. “Can we get this isofix base thingy for this car seat then?” I raise my eyebrows.

“This particular model doesn’t have one, so you will need to look for another system that has a compatible base,” he explains, as if it’s all very straight-forward. Great, so we’re back to square one.

And it’s not just this new concept of isofix – it’s everything else. We learn that very few car seats as part of a travel system come with isofix, and if they do they need to have been tested on your car model to show they’re safe enough.  After a chat over some tea, we decide that it would probably be easier to buy a car seat separately and then purchase a travel system which only has the pram and buggy included. But can we find such an item – and for under, say, £600? Of course not! Have any of the suitable car seats we like been tested in our car? No again! After all this head-bending discussion, we finally get a travel system on special offer, get it home, (thanks to husband lugging it all into the car and up the stairs) and then realise that the pram part is not detachable from the whole system: I will most certainly need this function when I am taking baby out and returning to carry her up the stairs. We ended up having to take the whole thing back to shop and – you guessed it – start the search all over again. Eventually we find a travel system online for a third of the price, which turns out to be lovely. In the meantime, we’ll leave the car seat for now.