Everyone tells you how tired you will be with a newborn, but look at someone who has a 3 month old baby: it’s more than you can anticipate before having children, unless you have previously been an ultramarathon runner and/or an offshore oil rig worker. sea.
When you put your freshly baked human in a car seat, stroller, or generally take them anywhere with you (which you apparently have to do), you don’t just want the process to be easy; you need the process is easy. That’s why I fell in love with the Britax Willow Grove SC travel system.
This car seat base, car seat, stroller and stroller base come together in one package and it all works. There are no tricks for installation or daily use. Anyone can easily figure out how to use every part of these things, even when they haven’t slept for days. Simply place your little one in the stroller or car seat attachment, fold the rolling base with one hand, and you’re ready to go wherever you need to go. The price you pay for this system is about $100 higher than you’d pay for another all-in-one option from Chicco, but the build quality and ease of use are well worth the extra cost.
Load
The most important thing for any newborn is a quality car seat and base; The hospital literally checked that we had ours installed before allowing us to leave. There are no official safety ratings for this system, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommends rear-facing seats like this one for infants. I grew up (and later babysat) in a time when you had to take your car to the fire department to have the car seat base permanently installed in the back seat until the child was old enough to not need it, So color me excited when I realized how easy it was going to be to install the Britax base.
Photography: Parker Hall
Simply click the two hooks around the now-standard child restraint area on your car seats (two hooks that are often hidden behind the cushions), thread the seat belt through the vehicle’s patented ClickTight installation system. company and press down. Everything snaps into place easily and takes about 30 seconds to install. Once you’ve done it once, changing cars is very simple. No need to have two bases for different cars/friends/family.
Attaching the car seat to the base is also very simple; It just fits perfectly, with a handle on the front side of the carrier (where your baby’s back faces) that allows you to easily detach it with one hand while the other grabs the carrier’s handle. Aside from the weight of your baby (we have a lunker!), it is extremely manageable and convenient.
I like that there are little plastic tabs on the left and right sides of the car seat that you can use to hold the straps in place while you place your baby’s bottom in the seat. This makes it very easy to place your baby in her seat with the three-piece harness and secure him with the strap between your legs.
On a walk
The best part about the car seat is that it easily fits and attaches to the folding base of the stroller, meaning you don’t have to transfer a sleeping child to the stroller seat when you want to take them somewhere right out of the car. This is amazing, especially since the folding stroller section can be easily deployed with just one hand, thanks to a simple clip-on hook mechanism on the outside of the right rear wheel post. You simply unclip the plastic piece that holds the folded stroller and gravity does the rest.
Photography: Parker Hall