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There's an astonishing choice of pushchairs, prams, strollers and buggies for transporting your baby. Ursula Seymour, who writes for a range of magazines and newspapers including The Sunday Times, picks five of the very best Click to view Top 5 Pushchairs.
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Best 'Money No Object' (Bugaboo Cameleon) |
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 If you want the most stylish buggy in the park and you don't mind paying through the nose for it, then the Bugaboo Cameleon is the one for you. While there are pretenders to its crown of fashionistas' buggy of choice, if this one is good enough for Madonna, Stella and Gwynnie, it has to top the must-have pushchair list. |
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| But if you do opt for a pushchair like the Bugaboo you are tending to go for style over substance as, while it has plenty of points to recommend it (indeed the Cameleon won Practical Parenting's Best Pushchair award in 2007), it costs a fortune and takes up a lot of space. |
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 At £530 for the base unit and carrycot for a newborn, money will have to be only a minor consideration if you opt for this buggy, and this is before you add on expensive matching accessories such as footmuff, rain cover, parasol and car-seat adapters.
To be fair this buggy is a full travel system, which essentially means that you can connect other items, such as a carrycot and car seat to the base chassis so it will grow with your child. This type of "system" pushchair is usually more expensive than other, less versatile, kit.
By opting for a travel system, when you have a newborn you can clip in the carrycot so the baby can lay flat and the car seat adapters mean that you can click in a car seat, so you won't have to wake your baby when transferring the seat between the car and the Bugaboo frame. As your child grows up the base unit can be used as a standard pushchair, so, in theory, you can keep this buggy until your child no longer needs one at all.
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Leapfrogging the Frog |
 The Cameleon is the successor of the celeb favourite, the Bugaboo Frog, and does add a few welcome improvements, such as an adjustable handle, which was a major deficiency with the original model. It also retains the innovative reversible parent-facing seat design, which means you can position the seat so your baby faces you while you push. Another plus is the ability to choose from a whole range of colours - pink for a girl, blue for a boy or pretty much anything in between.
Living up to its namesake, the Cameleon is an adaptable pushchair, with two wheel positions to make it easier to manoeuvre off-road and in snow and sand and adjustable swivel wheel suspension, which makes for a smooth ride. The three-position seat means you can adjust it to your child's needs and despite being relatively bulky, it's still pretty lightweight at 9kg. One reviewer on the Babyworld website said this was ideal after her caesarian section: "[The Cameleon] was an absolute Godsend in the early days as it was so easy and light to push."
The downside to all the features and adjustable options is that the Cameleon can be hard to master. If you can, buy well before you give birth and spend some time working out how to use it, how to clip on accessories and, most important, how to collapse the thing. There is nothing worse as a new mum than struggling to squash down your pushchair to get it into the boot while your newborn screams in the car seat.
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Size matters |
 Speaking of boot space, you will need plenty of it to fit this pushchair as it is clearly designed with the 4x4 tank driver in mind. A review on the Mumsnet website complains that it "takes up loads of boot space and takes two journeys from house to car to bring in, as it splits into two parts when you fold it down".
Overall, if you have the money and the space then this is certainly a top-of-the-range pushchair, with the added kudos of celebrity endorsement. It's lightweight, manoeuvrable and stylish, offering a comfortable ride even off-road and the flexibility of a travel system. This winning combination has seen it lap up awards, not only from Practical Parenting, but from the all-important mum's websites, gomamatoday.com and mumsnet.com.
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To buy this product try one of the following retailers. They are competitively priced and reliable:
Amazon.com - The US arm of the online retailer
Amazon.co.uk - The UK arm of the online retailer
For currency converter click here
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Other great reviews in KidsStuff:
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