It never ceases to amaze me how quickly things move on in the baby equipment market. I'm a mum of three and my youngest is still only three and a half, so I thought I was pretty up to date with all things baby and child-related. I realised that this wasn't the case though when I was asked to check out a number of brands including Phil and Teds.
Phil and Teds? This immediately made me think of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, a totally dorky (but nevertheless quite entertaining, at the time !) film starring a very young Keanu Reeves as a dumb teen who travels back in time collecting famous historical figures for a school project. I've just checked and it was released in 1989, which has made me feel really old ! If you want to find out more about Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and have a laugh at how uncool Keanu looked back then, you might want to click through on this link.
However, if you're more interested in Phil and Teds, you need to click through to here. And at Phil and Teds, you won't get dorky teens and atrocious haircuts, you'll actually get some pretty cool pushchairs. The first thing that leapt out at me were the funky colours - golden kiwi, apple, chilli, cherry (yes, I know, it sounds like a shopping list at the greengrocer's so far !), flint or classic black. Then I looked a bit more at the write-up and was seriously impressed - it's compact, slimline, all-terrain and adapts between SEVEN different modes, including a second seat as your family grows. That sounds brilliant. Here at The Madhouse, the arrival of a new baby always meant that the current toddler got booted out of the pushchair so I'm sure they would have really appreciated this feature !
I decided to head through and look at another product range I'd never heard of - the Recaro Baby Seat. I was busy checking out the safety features - side bolsters, Isofix connectors and (something which is great for making child car seats "cool" for that tricky pre-teen age range when they think they're too old for baby seats) a headrest with an inbuilt sound system and mp3 player holder - when Pierre walked past and said "is that the Avengers?". Now, I was looking at it through adult eyes as a car seat and hadn't noticed that it looked like a face until he mentioned it, but now I can't see anything else. The write-up doesn't mention this though so I don't know if it's intentional or just a random quirk of the design !
Either way, one thing is sure. If you've got a new baby on the way and are planning on dragging your old baby equipment out of the loft for round two (or three or four ...), you may want to head over to a baby store to check out what improvements have been made in the few short years since you were last checking out what was on offer.
I had great fun being a Graco ambassador back in 2010 and got to try out several of their new products - the Nautilus car seat, the Fusio pushchair, the Symbio travel system and the Junior Maxi Plus car seat - so feel free to see my reviews of those products. Having looked at the brand new designs, I have to say they look almost slightly old fashioned now though !
Disclosure : This is a sponsored, but nevertheless honest and hopefully entertaining, post.
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I really liked Keanu Reeves. I was 17 and very much smitten. Bodacious.... :D
ReplyDeleteBodacious !! That's the very word I was trying to think of and totally failed !! lol
DeleteHaha....I often say things like 'most excellent', and then I'm disappointed no-one even raises an eyebrow! :D
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