Cherry On The Top...
Published on Wednesday 7th March 2007
Of all the baby paraphernalia that expectant parents buy, the vehicle that you push them around in has to be the one item that’s most vulnerable to the fickle whim of fashion. And increasingly the pushchair you choose might also be the most expensive item in that never-ending list of baby kit.
But there’s a good reason for this. Once you’ve had a baby, unless you decide that baby-carrying is the lifestyle for you (and that’s a whole other blog), you are going to be pushing that thing day in, day out, for two years minimum. Of course it’s important that it looks damn fine!
In the wake of Bugaboo fever (that’s the funny looking Dutch one with the diddy front wheels that can be found en masse in most parks), £500 has become an acceptable amount to spend on a pushchair/carrycot/car-seat combo in order to keep up with the Alpha Mummies. And now the space-age style Stokke - incredibly well-designed but slightly odd in appearance - costs anywhere between £500-700.
 But you don’t have to splash that much to have a good-looking appendage. Recently I test-drove the new pushchair from i-candy, the Cherry, which is a little sister for the bulkier Apple (similar in appearance to the Bugaboo yet more reasonable in price).
The great thing about the i-candy Cherry  , available from mid-March and costing £299 for the combo, is that it’s lighter and therefore more practical than its bigger cousins. This means that you can look good and take public transport (god forbid!) without the rest of bus staring at you like you’re driving a gas-guzzling X5.
Babyplanners’ key mantras are reversible seats (so nice to be able to see your child when they’re smothering banana everywhere) and one handle (even nicer to be able to gossip on your phone and go up curbs/turn corners). And the i-candy Cherry passed the test.
But although your mum will willingly wax lyrical about how back in the old days babies used to face their pushers, these days it’s pretty rare to find a decent reversible seat pushchair. Bugaboos are ok but there are plenty of mums who will tell you they threw the seat across the room a hundred times before replacing it with a light-weight Maclaren.
So under-exposed are affordable pusher-facing buggies that the National Literacy Trust has waded in with their “talk to your baby” campaign to promote them. And if the trust gets its way, those which conform will soon be rewarded with a “walkie talkie” badge.
This is all good stuff. Your baby can endure muscular injuries from leaning back to get a glimpse of you. Plus, of course, it’s better to gabble to each other and actually hear what’s being said above the roar of the traffic.
That said, very soon you and your passenger will be able to drown out the traffic with any given tune, as German pushchair manufacturer Hauck is shortly launching the demo model of its I’coo Pico pushchair complete with i-pod docking station. Now that really is a whole other blog…
The iCandy Cherry, available mid-March, from www.iCandyUK.com.
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