UppaBaby Travel System
The term for a car seat + stroller + bassinet + stroller seat is "travel system". In practice, what you can do is buy separate things and then get adapters for most popular devices. Some of the popular brands in this are Clek, Diono, Graco, Uppababy. Clek seats need adapters, Diono's just sit in the car, and the other two have travel systems.
The things that we were looking for were:
- As few moving parts as possible
- As light as possible
- Comfortable ride handling
- Ideally single-handed operation
In the end, we decided on an Uppababy travel system. The standard ones you probably want are:
Picking a travel system from a single brand has the primary advantage that everything works with everything else without adapters, and if you have trouble then you only need to contact a single manufacturer. A friend of ours expressed that a thing they would have appreciated is the ability to pick up their child from the car seat and transfer them to the stroller to transport them without needing to explicitly wake them. The Uppababy Mesa is one such car seat.
You'll ultimately need the bassinet because infants are meant to be on their backs for them to grow properly.
The Cruz stroller isn't the only one that Uppababy offers. There is a slightly more expensive Vista stroller that has a tandem mode where you can transport two children: one lower to the ground and one above. In our case we decided to save the extra weight and figured that we'd just repeat the research process at child #2 when we need to, but we do know of another couple who has just given birth who chose the Vista.
Each Uppababy device has a version number and there's never a reason to choose anything but the highest number version currently available. As of this time, they all correctly interoperate.
For car seats, the crucial thing to know is that you want to use the LATCH system in your car if you can. It's much simpler than running the seat belts around. These are rear seat metal loops that are hidden near the point where the backrest meets the part where you sit. You usually undo a velcro or button cover where you sit and it's there.
When we first picked up the Mesa, I set it down on a coffee table and it promptly fell to the floor. If you Google what this means for the car seat, there are lots of people who will tell you that this ruins the car seat. When we contacted Uppababy about this they asked us to check if anything was broken on the seat, and that if nothing was, then it's fine to use because the device is meant to withstand a lot more force.
One of the big advantages we had was that many people in our network had children just before us. This meant that when Julie's sister visited us with her daughter we were able to put the stroller, car seat, and bassinet to the test. The bassinet attaches to the stroller but we also parked it in the bedroom for them to use as a stationary bassinet. So far, we feel quite good about the travel system we've chosen. Our niece never slept through a car seat disengage and transfer to stroller but she also did fall right back to sleep post transfer.
Review Post Usage
Overall, we are thrilled with the Uppababy system. We haven't felt the need for anything to be different. However, a friend visited us and they had an Uppababy Aria car seat (compatible with the entire system) and that one felt noticeably lighter than our Mesa. The Mesa has these affordances to make it easy to carry under the arm, but the Aria is much lighter.
The Uppababy Bassinet is great. Our daughter, Astra, spends most of her time sleeping in it even at home.
8 months in, we are quite happy with the entire setup. My parents find the stroller easy to use, Astra finds it comfortable, and it's large enough for us to go shopping with it and treat it as a shopping cart for groceries. Quite often, though, we will not bring it because it's got a large footprint. As an example, on our first flight we don't plan on bringing it.
Review Post Travel
We traveled to Las Vegas with the Uppababy Mesa V2 car seat, but not with the rest of the travel system. United allowed us to check the car seat for free in a big car seat bag, and we covered it with diapers to make sure it didn't get too bumped up, though I doubt this would do anything to it. The car seat is quite heavy when the base is attached, and we took it like that everywhere. This was honestly not straightforward. However, carrying the base did help since installing the car seat is much easier when the base is around. The LATCH is very straightforward, but even the seatbelt is trivial. By contrast, installing it without the base and with the seatbelt along is much more complex. It's probably worth learning if you want to take it along with you, though.
