My Love-Hate Relationship With The Massive Uppa Baby Stroller

I was standing in what can only be described as a biblical amount of mud on Hampstead Heath, rain aggressively lashing against my glasses, while Twin A screamed with the sheer lung capacity of an opera singer and Twin B quietly tried to eat a dead worm. The left front wheel of my outrageously expensive transport system was lodged in a rut so deep it might have been an archaeological dig site. It was a Tuesday morning, I was running on roughly forty minutes of broken sleep, and I found myself negotiating with a twenty-seven-pound piece of aluminum just to get back to my flat.

This is the glamorous reality of the morning stroll they don't print in the glossy brochures.

If you're expecting a baby, or worse, two of them at the exact same time, you've probably already fallen down the internet rabbit hole. I know I did. I was sitting in our cramped third-floor flat, frantically typing half-finished thoughts into Google. At one point I just searched for a baby str before my laptop keyboard completely jammed because I'd spilled a pint of water on it in my panicked state. Eventually, though, the targeted ads found me, and I was convinced that what I desperately needed was an uppa baby stroller, mostly because I saw a minor celebrity looking impossibly rested while pushing one in a magazine at the dentist's office.

The day the massive boxes arrived

Nothing quite prepares you for the physical footprint of premium baby gear. When the delivery driver dumped the boxes in our narrow London hallway, I legitimately thought he'd delivered a disassembled refrigerator by mistake. We were upgrading our lives for a baby, but the sheer volume of cardboard felt like we were preparing for a lunar expedition.

My wife was scheduled for a C-section, and our NHS health visitor, a lovely but deeply stern woman named Brenda who smelled faintly of antiseptic and unspoken judgment, was very clear about the physical realities of the postpartum period. She looked at the giant chassis leaning against our radiator, looked at me, and muttered something about how my wife shouldn't be lifting anything heavier than a kettle for at least six weeks, let alone attempting to heave this tank into the boot of a Ford Fiesta.

Brenda was absolutely right, which meant I became the sole operator of the heavy machinery. The sheer weight of the frame is something you just have to accept. It's solid, it's virtually indestructible, and it'll give you the upper body strength of an amateur bodybuilder if you've to carry it up three flights of stairs because the lift in your building is broken again.

The great accessories racket

Let's talk about the absolute sheer audacity of the accessories market for a moment, because this is where I start to lose my mind. You spend an astronomical sum on this beautiful piece of engineering, you unpack it, you marvel at the leather handles and the smooth suspension, and then you realize that absolutely nothing you actually need to survive a Tuesday afternoon is included in the box.

I want to be very clear about the cup holder. The official cup holder costs roughly the same as a moderately priced dinner for two, and yet it possesses a magical ability to detach itself from the frame at the exact moment you hit a slight bump on the pavement. I once watched in slow-motion horror as my scorching hot Costa flat white ejected itself entirely, splashing across my only clean pair of jeans and missing Twin A's head by a matter of inches, all because I dared to push the stroller over a tactile paving slab at a pedestrian crossing. You will buy the cup holder anyway because the idea of getting through an afternoon without immediate access to caffeine is laughable, but you'll resent it every single day.

Then there's the snack tray, the parent organizer, the upper adapters, the lower adapters, the adapters for the adapters. It's a logistical nightmare that requires a spreadsheet to track.

The rain cover does technically keep the water out until you inevitably lose it on a bus.

Sleep science mumbled in a clinic

One of the main selling points that justified the terrifying credit card bill was the bassinet. Apparently, it's approved for safe overnight sleep. Now, I don't pretend to understand the deep mechanics of infant spinal development—our GP waved a pamphlet at us once and mumbled something about flat airways and SIDS risks while looking for his pen—but the basic gist is that they need to lie completely flat.

We actually did use the bassinet in the living room for those early weeks. It was brilliant to just unclick a sleeping baby and carry the whole unit inside without waking them, though doing this with twins meant I had to make two trips to the car while leaving one baby momentarily alone with the cat, who viewed them entirely as a suspicious new species of hairless prey.

To try and make the bassinet slightly more welcoming, I picked up the Colorful Leaves Bamboo Baby Blanket. I'll say this for it: the organic bamboo and cotton blend is almost absurdly soft, and whatever natural temperature regulation it has seemed to actually work, because Twin B stopped waking up with a sweaty, angry red face. It looks beautiful too, with these delicate watercolor leaves. However, it's almost too nice for the brutal reality of an outdoor baby stroller. I made the mistake of letting it drape over the side on a windy day, and it immediately got sucked into the muddy brake mechanism. It survived the washing machine, but I mostly reserve it for indoor floor time now where the primary threat is just regular spit-up rather than London street grime.

Looking for something soft to catch the inevitable drool? Browse the organic blanket collection here.

Teething while trapped in transit

Around month six, the drool started. Not just a little bit of spit, but a constant, cascading waterfall of saliva that soaked through three bibs an hour. This is when they start trying to eat the stroller.

I caught Twin A desperately gnawing on the expensive leather bumper bar like it was a beef jerky stick. Knowing how much a replacement bar costs, I panicked and started throwing various objects at her to distract her. This is how we discovered our absolute favorite coping mechanism: the Panda Teether.

I genuinely love this thing. It's just a flat piece of food-grade silicone shaped like a panda, but it saved my sanity on countless bus rides. The girls could honestly grip the little bamboo details themselves without dropping it every four seconds, and it provided enough resistance that they stopped trying to consume the stroller upholstery. The best part is the sheer durability of it. It once fell directly into a puddle outside King's Cross station; I picked it up, washed it off with half a bottle of sparkling water and some frantic scrubbing with a baby wipe, and handed it right back. You're supposed to put it in the dishwasher or fridge, which I do when I remember, but in the trenches, you just do what you've to do.

Of course, having twins means you can't just have one of anything unless you want to witness a cage match in the back of a cafe. We had to immediately get the Squirrel Teether with Acorn Design for Twin B. The ring shape on this one is brilliant because I can loop a dummy clip through it and tether it directly to the harness straps, completely eliminating the delightful game where they throw it on the floor and scream until I pick it up.

The rumble seat weight limit betrayal

As the girls approached eighteen months, the physics of our daily walk began to change. If you're using this specific brand as a double, you've the main toddler seat up top, and the RumbleSeat down below.

Here's the massive catch that nobody emphasizes when you're sleep-deprived and throwing money at a screen: the main seat holds up to 50 pounds, but the RumbleSeat only holds 40 pounds.

When you've twins, they generally weigh roughly the same. But eventually, you hit this terrifying window where they're getting heavier, and the lower seat is reaching its absolute structural limit while the top seat is perfectly fine. You end up with an incredibly top-heavy contraption that requires the core strength of an Olympic gymnast to pop over a street curb.

I remember trying to mount the pavement outside our local Tesco. I pushed down on the handle, the front wheels lifted exactly half an inch, the entire frame groaned in protest, and I nearly pulled a muscle in my lower back that still clicks when it rains. It's a magnificent piece of engineering, but once you load it with two toddlers, three bags of groceries in the frankly massive 30-pound capacity basket, and an assortment of heavy wooden toys, you're essentially driving a small tractor.

The great Facebook marketplace handoff

Eventually, the girls just wanted to walk, or rather, they wanted to sprint in opposite directions toward the nearest busy road while I screamed their names. We didn't need the massive tank anymore.

This is where the initial financial trauma honestly pays off. The resale market for premium baby gear is absolutely unhinged in the best possible way. I spent a Saturday morning scrubbing dried banana out of the seat crevices with an old toothbrush, hosed down the wheels, and took some vaguely professional-looking photos in our living room.

I listed it on Facebook Marketplace and within twelve minutes I had four people fighting over it. I sold it to a terrified-looking expectant dad in a Sainsbury's parking lot for slightly more than half of what we originally paid for it. As I watched him awkwardly try to fold it to fit it into his hatchback—a complicated two-handed maneuver that takes months of practice to master without trapping your thumb—I felt a weird pang of grief. That massive, heavy, cup-holder-dropping piece of metal had carried my girls through their entire early infancy.

If you're staring down the barrel of buying one, just know what you're getting into. It will dominate your hallway, it'll drain your bank account, but it'll also carry absolutely everything you own across very muddy parks without the wheels falling off. Just please, for the love of all that's holy, don't buy the cup holder.

Ready to outfit your inevitable stroller purchase with things they can safely chew on? Grab our organic teething collection before your baby tries to eat the bumper bar.

Messy questions from the trenches

Do I genuinely need to buy the expensive cup holder?
No, you absolutely don't need it, but you'll break down and buy it anyway around month three when the sheer exhaustion takes over. You will then spend the next two years picking it up off the floor every time you bump a door frame. Try to balance a water bottle in the canopy instead; it's less heartbreaking.

Can I fit this monstrosity on a London bus?
Technically, yes. The wheelbase will exactly fit into the designated wheelchair/pram space. However, if there's already another pram on the bus, or heaven forbid, someone who really needs the wheelchair space, you'll have to do the walk of shame right back off the bus in the pouring rain while the driver glares at you.

Is the resale value really real?
Astoundingly, yes. It's basically a currency at this point. As long as you haven't let your child take a permanent marker to the sun canopy or snapped the frame in half, you can reliably claw back a huge chunk of your money to fund the next stage of expensive things they'll quickly outgrow.

How do I clean random stains out of the bassinet fabric?
With mild panic and a lot of spot-cleaning. The mattress cover zips off and can be machine washed (thank god), but the outer fabric requires you to dab at it with a damp cloth while praying the stain isn't what you think it's.

Will the tyres pop on broken glass?
This is seriously the one thing I can't fault. The tyres are made of some sort of solid, foam-filled material. I've pushed that thing over broken beer bottles, sharp gravel, and an uncomfortable amount of unidentified urban debris, and never once had a flat tyre. It's the only stress-free part of the entire experience.