Carrying baby

We all need a papoose in life!

One of the most troublesome aspects of young children is their inability to do much in the way of moving. Yes, they might be able to crawl a bit, they may even be able to walk a little but, for the first few years at least, you can’t really go anywhere and expect them to keep up. 

And so we bought a push chair for young Marty, then we bought another, and then another. I questioned my wife as to why we only seemed to have one child yet owned a pram for every day of the week, and the answer turned out to be rather long and tortuous.

Firstly we had a pram that allowed Marty to lie down or sit up as the feeling took him. This wonder pram also came with three huge wheels which allowed us to go ‘off-road’ during the morning walks with the dog. Sadly, it was also just a little too big to fit into the car boot and was a bit of a nightmare to dismantle. So we bought a lighter, smaller, easier to pack away pram for shopping trips and general wanderings around the town.

This was all well and good but then spring arrived and car-boot sale season began. Within weeks we had filled the house with push chairs of every description, which were all apparently ‘bargains’ and offered something unique in the way of perambulation. Sadly, they all failed on one point. My main hobby is collecting wild mushrooms for which wandering woods is pretty much d’rigour and whilst we had a variety of prams that could handle muddy footpaths none of them were truly ‘off-road’. How were we going to go on a family mushroom hunt?

First off we tried one of those baby rucksacks. You know the kind, look just like an ordinary rucksack but instead of filling it with sandwiches and sleeping bags you can stuff a baby inside instead. They looked kind of cute but they put a hell of a strain on the old back. The problem was that Marty could lean back in it and, using the general laws of leverage, double his weight as and when the feeling took him. They were fine for about 10 minutes but any longer was agony.

So we tried a baby sling, or papoose. Our one was basically an enormous long sheet of soft, slightly elasticated, material that you wrapped around you. Initially it took me the best part of half an hour to wrap this thing around me and you could generally bet that within minutes Marty would be swaying round at about knee level whilst hanging on for dear life. 

This was all marvellous for comic effect and photo opportunities but next to useless as a form of transport. Fortunately, once you got the hang of them they proved to be brilliant.

Because they hold the baby very close to your body the weight is much easier to handle, there’re no hard bits to poke and prod you and they keep both you and baby snug and warm, in fact you effectively wander around in a permanent hug, which is all rather nice.

The only downside is that once Marty got taller I couldn’t put him in it in front of me as his head kept hitting my chin. You can arrange them so the kid is wrapped around your back but I needed at least one person to help me get him in and several to help me get him out. I dare say some people can manage it a bit more elegantly but I am not one of these elite few.

So for a while we were a bit buggered and me and the dog had to wander the woods alone. Then Leanne found a neat little thing on Ebay – an online car boot sale. It was a rucksack that you could put your child in but it was also a push chair! This sounded brilliant! We could heave Marty around on my back when we were hacking our way through the undergrowth and then push him along once we reached a footpath.

What we actually got was a “Mothercare Back Pack Carrier and Stroller”. Sadly they don’t seem to do them now but you can still find them on-line. Of course the problem with things that attempt two functions is that they tend to not be much good at either but I think this has managed quite well, although it’s a much better as a rucksack than it is as a pram - the wheels are too small, the whole thing tends to be a little too low to the ground and you tend to get a muddy bum if you convert a few times during wet weather.

On the plus side it’s very easy to convert from one to the other, possibly because when it’s a rucksack it looks as if you’re carrying a push chair on your back and when it’s a push chair it looks as if you’re wheeling along a rucksack.

The first week

So we got through Week one and what did we learn?

Well it was easier than I’d expected, partly because of the amount of sparkling wine we received when Marty was born and partly because babies seem to be designed to wean you into parenthood. For example, newborns are fairly easy to handle; whilst they might struggle a little they aren’t capable yet of that back flip that they perfect in later months, the one that can propel them several feet into the air before you can say “OhmyGodwhereshegone??”

Another thing with newborns is that, whilst they need carrying everywhere, you get eased into this by the fact that you can put very young babies down and then find them again, 5 minutes later, exactly where you'd put them! This is a darn handy feature but I’ve been told not to expect this fact to continue for much longer.

Poo is a big feature of early parenthood, in fact I suspect it will feature large in my life for at least the next 3 years. Newborn baby poo is designed in a range of frightening colours from black, through bright yellow, to ominous green. Whilst this means that you might not eat chip shop curry sauce, Dijon mustard or mushy peas ever again it does at least have the virtue (so far at least) of being produced in manageable portions with an accompanying scent that, whilst hardly Chanel No.5, doesn’t cause a gag reflex to kick in.... which is just as well as it tends to be the kind of scent that lingers. I think it gets stuck in the back of your nose, or something, because I’ll be sipping coffee in the local Plumb Center, miles away from mother and baby, when I’ll suddenly get a strong whiff of Marty’s derriere.

Our first pram ride was a revelation. The first issue was that our pram seems to have been designed by the bloke who invented the Rubic’s cube; it took me half the morning to figure out how to collapse it so it fitted in the car and the rest of the afternoon to figure out how to uncollapse it so we could take Marty out in it. Even then it was an entire week before we discovered that the wheels came off, which was handy as it didn’t fit into the car with them on.

The second thing I noticed was that our pram had rubbish suspension but this was quickly followed by the realisation that babies love rubbish suspensions. Marty likes nothing more than being pushed at high speed over horribly uneven surfaces – ideally a cobbled road with the odd pot hole thrown in for good measure. It’s odd, but he loves the sort of travel conditions that would have an adult up in arms; if he’s not a vibrating blur in the pram he’s just not happy.