Let 'em walk!!

My mother had 5 children. I am the oldest. And except for my lil bro' Lewes (the next in line after me) I can remember each of my siblings as small infants... babies. And there is absolutely no, I repeat NO, memory of my mom ever owning a baby stroller.

Don't ask me how she did it, specially around the time when the smallest was still a 3 month-old baby and the oldest a 14 year-old brat, but somehow she managed to get the shopping, the dropping off and picking up at the schools, the visiting with friends, the going from A to B hauling all of us without the help of a stroller.

So why is it that here it seems a stroller is one of the TOP 3 things on the shopping list of every mom-to-be?*

Even after so long, The Stroller Issue still continues to puzzle me here. Take a walk in Paris and count how many strollers you see during your promenade, you’ll be surprised.

I may be wrong but it just seems like maneuvering a stroller is quite a troublesome thing so I can’t imagine why on earth women would put up with it more than the strict necessary. I can understand the eventual need of a poussette (stroller) when your child is say, between the age they’ve become too heavy to carry in a kangaroo thingy and the time they start walking, but using a stroller anytime before of after this period just seems like more of a nuisance than a help to me!

I see women in Paris having to carry the stroller (kid in it!) up and down the metro stairs, I see them have to shove the stroller (kid in it!) onto an already jam-packed bus, I see them maneuvering it through the minuscule Parisian supermarket aisles (kid AND groceries in it!)…. I see them struggling to get the stroller in and out of a car or elevator or phone booth…. Why on earth would mommies want to be stuck with such a huge, plastic, heavy appendage!!! Wouldn’t a two month old be more comfortable in a little kangaroo strap leaving both of mommy’s hands free to deal with everyday stuff? Wouldn’t little 4 year-old Jr. prefer to walk and chase the pigeons during his afternoon promenade rather than watch them from afar while strapped in to a chair? Wouldn’t the 6 year-old mademoiselle find it more amusing to be sitting in the front seat of a shopping cart rather than obliged to lay back in her stroller and watch only legs and lower shelves?

See, the thing is I’ve noticed it’s quite common here to see kids that are old enough to walk and run and skip and hop strapped instead to a stroller and it makes me wonder if it really is easier for the parents to maneuver a stroller rather than a walking toddler. I guess I can see the pros and the cons on the parents’ side…. but what’s in it for the kid? Is it really good for a child to learn that when he/she gets tired of walking all he/she has to do is climb back into the stroller and mommy and daddy will push for the rest of the way?

And then there is the stroller itself!

It reminds me of a purse actually. Initially purses were invented for women to carry the bare necessities in a practical way (keys, wallet, chapstick). But then fashion made purses larger and suddenly we shove our entire makeup kit in them (hair spray included), and our three pairs of sunglasses and a change of stockings and a smaller purse for the “important stuff you don’t want lost in your purse like your keys, wallet and chaptstick” until the darn thing is so heavy and troublesome it’s become a (fashionable) drag lugging that thing with us all day long….

The same goes for the stroller. Because strollers have become such a sophisticated, modern and apparently INDISPENSABLE object, French parents go absolutely mental picking theirs out! A friend of mine actually visited a STROLLER EXPOSITION here in Paris before deciding that she would buy hers in Austria and have it shipped here because it was the only model that came with, get this, hiking wheels! So anyway, they buy the biggest, chunkiest thing on the market, with the widest wheels and the most amount of pockets all over and make sure it’s waterproof and sun proof and soundproof (because of course they’re planning on taking their baby to a Guns ‘n Roses concert. In the Sahara dessert. In the middle of a rainstorm) and suddenly they’re hauling not only their kid in that thing but also a lot of extra junk they don’t even need (extra snacks, pair of shoes, a smaller stroller...) just because they can…

Every time one of our French friends says that coming over to our place “would be complicated with the baby” I can’t help asking them why, and I always get the same response: “pffff… you know, it means we need to pack the poussette and the portable crib and the portable changing station and the portable (insert whatever other Fischer Price gadget you want) in the car”…. But… but… WHY? I mean, we have furniture and beds and blankets and pillows… we don’t live in a cave you know? We can improvise a little crib with these and you can certainly change your baby on our bed (I mean we do change our sheets once a week you know)… and why do you need a poussette if you’re already coming by car? Aren’t those wheels enough?

By this time the mommy in question is probably thinking I’m a completely lunatic and already feels sorry for our future children thinking we’ll probably build a crib for them out of a cardboard box (which, what’s wrong with that? My mom did it!!) and have them (gasp) walking in the street holding our hand by the time they’re 3!

Fned.

* Quick disclaimer: No visit from the "ciguena" is expected in our near future, so of course this is all nonsense rambling from a non-mommy sans stroller big mouth who probably doesn't know what she's talking about.