Young'ns and the Gear that Goes With Them

When you have children, everything changes.

Sure, your daily schedule changes as you forsake all sleeping in on Saturdays and Sundays. You trade in dinners at hip restaurants and start actually developing a taste for macaroni and cheese (the box variety). You learn the difference between The Backyardigans, Blues Clues and Little Einsteins. Most of these changes were things I expected and knew were part of the territory that came along with having children.


One thing I hadn't expected is the way that your idea of what's "cool" changes too. Maybe not completely -- I mean, its not as if you start thinking that everything about your new life is going to impress all of the hipsters and technorati and that the New York, Paris and Milan fashion scenes are going to start featuring models sporting diaper bags and sippy-cups. But you do start getting excited about things that just a few years ago would have produced only yawns and eye rolls from Pre-Baby You.

Take our new stroller. When Kate was born, Jaime got a nifty jogging stroller called The BOB. While it wasn't cheap, I marveled over how smoothly the wheels turned ("Must be German engineering," I thought) and how little friction there was when you pushed it. Jaime used it nearly every day to go running, and Kate rode along in comfort and style. But when Davis came along, I looked at the "Double Bob", but wasn't about to mortgage the house for a double-sized version of the one we had just purchased. And the double strollers I saw were either side by side models that seemed to take up the whole sidewalk or front-back arrangements that seemed to be about ten feet long and absolutely impossible to turn. Then Jaime started hearing about Phil and Ted's, a New Zealand based company that makes some innovative double strollers that only took up the same amount of space as a conventional single stroller. We were jazzed about the Sport buggy that features a number of different seating arrangements for either one or two children. It uses an over-under concept so that your stroller only takes up about as much space as a single stroller would. See what I mean about the changes in what gets you excited? How excited should I really get over a double stroller? Jaime looked at them online, and scoured Craig's List to try to find a used one since the price tag was not cheap, and I gave her a bit of a hard time about the fact that we had a perfectly good BOB sitting in the garage. But when Costco Online began carrying them at a retail price that was below what the used ones on Craig's List were going for, we went for it.

Kate surveys the scene while Davis snoozes

We currently have it configured for the "toddler + newborn" setup, where Kate rides up front and Davis is tucked into the lie-flat space on the back (note: its the space about at Jaime's knee level, not the basket that hangs down between the wheels):

When he gets a bit bigger we'll move the second seat attachment around back and Davis will ride up front and Kate will ride 'round back, a bit below. Check out the website to see the seating arrangements. Not cool, you say? I beg to differ.

Part of the shift in coolness is of necessity -- issues of practicality start to overwhelm your sense of what would be really cool, and coolness becomes a matter of relativity. For example, once you realize that a new sports car is not on the table, you have to try to maximize coolness wherever you can. That may not be easy when the vehicle your other half wants desperately is a minivan.

Of course, the minivan is the opposite of cool; its the very essence of uncool, unhip and unsexy. Manufacturers know this, of course, but the millions they pay each year to market research and ad firms is money well spent. They've realized that to convince many of us to buy a minivan, they needed to add gadgets. "Check out the navigation system," the salesman casually says as he sees the look of defeat start to cross your face as you survey the ultimate kid carrier. Your ears perk up and you sit up a little straighter. "Yes, this has Bluetooth connectivity for your cell phone," he repeats, while showing you the iPod auxiliary jack and the voice-activiated CD changer. "Sure, you can plug in your game console and play it over the onboard DVD player." Suddenly this summer's road trip to the family reunion doesn't sound so bad when you realize that you could play HALO all the way from L.A. to Las Vegas while the wife drives . . . .

And then you wake up with this in your driveway:

You know that the minivan isn't really cool, but you realize that you can distract yourself with the features that are.

Ultimately, you realize that when you walk through the door at the end of a long day and see these faces, THAT'S cool.

And that's why its worth driving a minivan.