Re: How old for strollers?

I have three kids, now all long out of the stroller phase. I used a
stroller into the kindergarten years - at least to age 5.

What I found was that when you go anywhere on foot with a toddler or
preschooler you have two problems.

One is all the junk you end up carrying with you - the snacks and
drinks, the jackets and hats, your purse, the handiwipes, maybe
diapers, toys, the quart of milk and loaf of bread you picked up, lord
knows what else. The stroller was a great place to stash all that - I
had a heavy duty one with big knobby tires so it could handle uneven
terrain and get pushed across the lawn at the park etc. It also had
space underneath it to carry cargo.

The second problem you have is that into those years, kids get tired.
They get cranky. They don't want to walk. They want you to carry them.
They pitch a fit, go all floppy, refuse to move. I dunno about you and
your back, but I can't carry 40 pounds of kid home from the park 5
blocks, as well as the sandtoys and the other junk, plus hold another
kid or two by the hand. I also didn't like having to cut short my
shopping, our visit to the zoo or the amusement park or the county fair
because a young child gets tired of walking. As long as a kid would fit
into a stroller, it was a godsend!

We took our family to Disney World in 2003, our youngest was 5, the
middle one was 9 and the oldest was not quite 12. We rented a stroller
there, and it was a very smart thing to do. Not only did it mean we
didn't have to lug all kinds of junk in our arms, on our backs etc. but
there is a LOT of walking there, and the 5 year old really would not
have survived if she couldn't have ridden a lot of the time. I think
we'd have been there two hours, and she'd have been ready for a nap,
miserable etc. and we'd have had to go back to hotel. The kind of
strollers they have for rent the 9 year old could fit into (he was very
slight and skinny) and we were constantly having to tell him to get out
of it, it was for his little sister! He would have been quite happy to
have been pushed around.

Mary G.

.

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