I have to come clean, I have never really been a stroller mama. My oldest child was carried in a sling and a Baby Bjorn before she started walking at the nice early age of 9 and half months! When we registered for baby products I literally had no clue what to register for, I was the first of my siblings to have a baby and only had one friend who had a baby and so my understanding of what would be good came from the checklist at Babies R US. So we ended up with one of those all in one stroller/ car seat combos, which seemed like a good idea at that moment but truthfully after Addie was a few months old we never even used the stroller portion. We would have been better with one of those click n go car seat base strollers, which I don’t think even existed back then or they didn’t carry it at Babies R Us.
Skip ahead to 5 years later, as a much more seasoned mama and once again more carrier focused than I had even been earlier we decided to register for a jogging stroller as my fiancé and I were avid runners and thought this the more appropriate solution all around. As many of us know you aren’t really suppose to run with your baby until they are 6-8 months old and I would even suggest older. Even though we had the car seat insert we rarely used this stroller until Riley was over a year old, in which we have definitely put some good miles on it! So once again we decided to use a click n go stroller base like this one , a relative had given to us until we could use our jogging stroller.
Then we found out less than 18 months later that we were having twins and the world we thought we had mastered become anew. Our plans changed, the way we parent changed, the things that I thought were unnecessary to buy with other babies became essential to our survival. My checklist included cribs, double nursing pillow, multiple double strollers, large woven wraps, new hospital grade pump and the list would continue to grow.
A simple pick up at my middle daughter’s preschool became a two-handed juggling act, complete with elbow door opens, kicking doors shut and somehow unlocking doors with a pinkie. As the boys got older this spectacle was crazier and harder, I just need a simple and quick way to get in and out of the school in under 5 minutes. Someday my TwinGo was my savior, while other days I didn’t even want to strain my back or patience trying to get these two to cooperate in the dual carrier, which I still believe is my most favorite twin item and definitely saved my sanity more than a few times.
TwinGo Carrier
One day my mom told me to swing by my sister’s house before pick up, where she had a large box with multiple accessories and told me that this might help speed up the pick up at the school. It was a double McClaren stroller, I had always wanted one and was floored that my mama had thought to get me such a nice gift. Unfortunately this one came broken, to my dismay and shock as I pulled the new tags from it in the preschool parking lot with 10 minutes before pick up. I was a cocky mama of 4, this stroller will be easy, it’s a gorgeous stroller but truly an easy pop up umbrella stroller, or so I thought. With my boys screaming to get out I put each child in the back of the SUV, trunk up to watch the magic… the magic didn’t come. Instead of popping up in one, or in the case of a double two swift moves, there it lay lifeless as I tried my hardest to push down the sides where they should “click”. That’s when I noticed the missing pin, of course at this point it was too late, my boys had figured out they were free and were hoping off the hitch like two curious high jumpers and running around the car. I tried to close the broken stroller up but to my dismay it wouldn’t close either. The mangled L shaped stroller lay out for the other mothers to see and with no hope of getting into the school in 3 manageable pieces my sweet daughter’s teacher saw my struggle outside her classroom window and brought my daughter to me in the parking lot as I was still managing to wrangle the stroller and the twins into the car.
After that I thought, never again… and honestly it took me a few months to send that baby back because… toddler twins y’all, need I saw more? Anyways when I finally got the new stroller back it was unfortunately not the same version, so that was a little disappointing but we decided to take it on a test drive and I’m giving my full review along with a quick video in part II, so come check it out!
