Wayb Pico Car Seat Review

If your kid is old enough, i.e. meets the minimum size requirement for the Wayb Pico Car Seat (22 lbs and 30 inches), then this seat is great for travelling. It's much smaller than the prior seat we used for travel, the Combi Coccoro, and although it's bigger than Wayb's marketing photos would like you to see, aainly in thickness/depth, still quite compact when folded.

We like the excellent engineering of the seat. Lots of small details show they've thought about how it's going to be used. For instance, the latch buckles, when not in use, latch to the seat itself, so aren't left to dangle. There are little elastic straps at the ends of the webbing so that you can roll up the extra length and tidily keep it rolled, so save from more dangle. The tether strap has a nice storage around of it's own. The overall design, with it's welded aluminum, is a refreshing change from bulky plastic car seats.

For travel purposes, it's easy to strap it into a car or airplane seat. In an airplane, it has the advantage of putting your kid much closer to the plane seat's back, which means that their little legs cannot kick the seat in front of them. If their legs are long enough to reach the seat in front, then your kid ought to be old enough to know better. For smaller kids, their legs will be straight out in front of them, and they can move around well enough to not feel too constricted. Although there is no hard partition between the seat fabric/mesh and the airplane buckle that'll be buckled right behind it, the distance is sufficient so that the buckle doesn't interfere with comfort.

The shoulder belt height is not adjustable so for shorter kids, they'll feel it on their necks, which might be uncomfortable. The shoulder pads aren't exactly soft either. We may substitute them with something more comfortable.

Another somewhat disadvantage is that unlike with the Combi, the seat is pretty vertical, i.e. your kid isn't much reclined, and thus, sleep means that their head will be unsupported. Maybe there needs to be a toddler neck pillow for this situation.

For transit, there is a backpack case option, though that means you can't carry anything else on your back. It is possible to strap it to a luggage rack as with any car seat.

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Combi Coccoro car seat

We use a Clek Fllo and Foonf in our everyday cars, but they're big, solid, and heavy, and not for travel (though I have read a blog post of someone using one of those on a plane!). We wanted something easier to travel with, and the wisdom of the 'net said that the lightest, smallest seat is the Combi Coccoro (I always have to look up how it is spelled: Coccoro or Cocorro, or Coccorro? A rather unfortunate name since the spelling is not clear ... anyway ...). We have flown with this, and used it as a regular car seat at our destination. Let's say, it works. While transiting, we strap it onto a regular folding luggage rack, and that works fine. There is no need to use a specialized rack like the Gogo Babyz. That probably works fine, but it's overkill. A cheapie luggage rack works fine too. With the rack, it can be wheeled down an airplane aisle. One reason we like this seat especially for airplane travel vs, for example, the Cosco Scenera Next, is that it has a hard back between the belt and your baby's back. Although we don't have direct experience with the Cosco, others mention that the belt buckle can be felt through the back and thus uncomfortable. With the Combi, it'd a bit fiddly to buckle an airplane seat buckle; you have to do it by feel because there's just not that much space. Two hints: one is that often, you have to shorten the buckle receiver to enable the buckle assembly to be tightened properly. To do this, twist the belt to shorten it. Second, when you buckle, keep the buckle opening flap against the chair back. If it's not, it'll be very difficult to open it once latched (thanks to other blogs for this info). so once strapped down, the seat is stable on the airplane seat, but after a certain age, because the seat moves your kid forwards just because of the depth of the seat, it puts your kid's feet just the right distance to kick the seat in front. Another thing, after a certain age, is that your kid will not always want to be strapped into it, especially on a long-haul flight. On our last long haul flight, we had an empty seat for much of the flight, and M ended up sleeping on our laps, so in that sense, buying the extra seat was kind of a waste of money. The seat is big and once strapped in, is there for the flight, so if your kid doesn't want to be in it, your kid will need to be on your lap. This is a bit of a disadvantage. How's the seat in a car? It's not so easy to strap in, so strapping it into a ride-share car can be a bit nerve-wracking with the time pressure. Especially with the tether attached, it is quite stable, but sometimes, for time reasons, the tether can be skipped and the seat is less stable. There are two design deficiencies that were negatives. One is that when you're strapping it in, it is easy to have the car's seatbelt interfere with the seat's seatbelt, with the end result that when you get your kid into the seat and buckled up, you find that you cannot tighten the traps properly. Another thing is that there is no real storage space for the seat's attachment belts (i.e. the latch connections), and they flop out and you have to push them back in all the time. In that sense, this seat isn't designed as a travel seat. Oh, one other thing we didn't like is their buckle mechanism and the way they make you fit the left/right buckle pieces together before being able to insert into the buckle receiver. Too fiddly. All that said, we used the seat on a number of trips, and it did the job. Reasonably small, reasonably lightweight, and reasonably easy to use. Not a glowing endorsement, but it did the job and we did travel with it without throwing it out in frustration.

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Uppababy Minu stroller

It's been a while since Uppababy released their compact Minu stroller, but we still don't see them often, while we do still see tons of Cruz and Vistas. We started with a Cruz, and we liked it a lot. We didn't go with a Vista because the Vista was just too big (though if you plan to have multiple kids, then I think it can be outfitted to hold two, whereas the Cruz is strictly one), but after M grew out of the infant car seat phase, the Cruz started to feel big, and we also wanted to have a more travel friendly stroller. We first tried the GB Pockit stroller. That is indeed very small when folded, but in actual use, it's wobbly and there's practically no storage ability and it lacks a good canopy. We researched the Mountain Buggy Nano, the Babyzen YOYO (which we tried in a store) and the Zoe XL1 and Zoe XLC (this latter we saw a fellow parent using and chatted to her about it; she liked it). But then Uppababy introduced the Minu, and after trying it out, we bought one. The Minu is not the smallest folding stroller, but it folds small enough to travel with (we bought its travel bag too). As a small folder, it frees up space in the trunk. We use it as our everyday stroller, and it has an ample storage basket and is solid to push around. The recline is easy to adjust and the canopy is full coverage. When we travel, it gets gate checked, so we're able to use it to haul our stuff, and M herself, through the airport. It fits fine in the x-ray machine.

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Pull ups: Huggies vs Pampers

M used Pampers Swaddlers as a baby, but recently, we started her in pull-ups in preparation for toilet training. We first bought Pampers pull-ups, and they were fine, and then we bought Huggies, because Costco, so this is a comparison review. Cut to the chase: Pampers are better. Here's why. The Huggies design uses "velcro-like" fasteners at the sides. I guess this makes it a bit easier to undo them if changing for poop, but the downside is that even putting them on, they can unfasten, and therefore, one has to be more careful pulling them up. Pampers, on the other hand, require tearing to take them apart -- the seams are solidly interlocked but can be torn apart when needed. We never felt they'd tear by accident. The Huggies are very full coverage, with a high waist. The Pampers ride somewhat lower, and fit better. Both are fine in terms of their being diapers after all.

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Similac Organic

Maybe like a lot of parents, we ended up using what M started with at the hospital. My wife was not producing a lot of breast milk, so M was supplemented early with formula, and while my wife endeavored to give as much breast milk as possible, with visits to the lactation coach and trying various techniques, we stopped at 6 weeks because it was just too difficult, and her milk production slowed despite everything. So M was primarily a formula fed baby. We wanted to at least go organic, so we went with the Similac Organic. M had no digestive problems with it, and ate it eagerly, so no reason to try anything else. One thing that was very convenient is that Similac offers one-serving ready-to-feed bottles. You can find them on Amazon and other sites, but as I remember, the cheapest price was from the manufacturer site itself, Abbott Labs.

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Dr. Brown's Baby Bottles

There's really only one reason we used these, which is that at the baby shower, someone gave a starter set to us. That said, there was not reason to look at anything else since baby M had no complaints. They're advertised to have a patented venting system, which mimics breastfeeding by preventing air bubbles and that supposedly reduces burping, gas, spit-up and even colic. It certainly makes sense in principle, that baby should not slowly create more vacuum in the bottle and thus make sucking out the milk more difficult. Apparantly, this vacuum-free effect also preserves the nutrients in milk and formula by reducing oxidization since there aren't any bubbles passing through the liquid. My wife was initially apprehensive about using plastic, and we got a few glass bottles to start, but they've quite heavy, and got less use because of that, eventually. I will say that a big downside of the Dr. Brown system is the number of parts. It's not complicated to put together or take apart, but it all needs washing. We, which is to say, I, hand washed everything since we had no confidence that a dishwasher could wash the tube/pipette-like things (they provide a little scrubber brush to wash these). I'll tell you a bright idea we had about baby bottles and going out -- buy a wide mouth Thermos (or equivalent), big enough so that if you have hot water in it, and you immerse your bottle, it comes up high enough such that it'll warm the contents. This is how we warmed the milk at restaurants or wherever. At home, we used a constant hot water device to essentially do the same thing since you wouldn't catch us microwaving the milk.

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About this Blog

Our daughter M is now 2.5 years old and we've bought many things for her (for us, really) to make our lives easier. In picking these things, we've perused many others' blogs, reviews on Amazon and elsewhere, and tried to do our research before deciding on what to get. By and large, we've been happy with our choices. That's not to say we wouldn't have been happy with some other manufacturer's identical gizmo, but we bought what we bought. The blog is to pay it forward, so to speak, and submit our own biases to others to use when deciding on things to buy that we've already bought and had experience with. To catch up on 2.5 years of things for M that are fast becoming ancient history, I'll start this blog with some baby things that we've been happy with, and move on to the present day.

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