Second Purchase: Graco Snugride

Well, we finally did it -- we bought a carseat. We really couldn't wait much longer, or we might find ourselves at the hospital with no baby seat to help us bring the baby back home.

On Friday we went into Kiddytown here in Ottawa, fully expecting to buy the brown-and-black Graco Snugride carseat that we'd looked at and mentioned in a previous posting. We'd even gotten as far as bringing the box to the front desk for checkout when I decided to ask one more question.

The question was about foam.

In the Consumer Reports tests that they did on carseats, they observed that the Snugride carseat with EPS foam performed quite well, despite the fact that they'd accidentally simulated a crash speed DOUBLE what they'd intended to test (link). They strongly recommended getting a model with the foam.

Standing at the checkout line, looking at the box, I didn't see anything about the magic foam written anywhere, so I asked about it. The people we spoke to didn't really know what I was talking about (there's another guy there who knows everything about carseats), but they kindly went to the shelves and pulled down another carseat model that was a little newer. It was the Snugride Metropolitan, which I've seen online, but never in a store. It was the same price as the Blackwell model, but it had the foam. The picture on the box made the colours seem a like a perfect match for our beige stroller (a Zooper Hula). When we had them open the box to examine the foam, we found that the colours were actually different -- the seat was in shades of grey.

After some lengthy consultations amongst ourselves, we decided that although the grey Metropolitan seat was slightly heavier (because of the added foam), it would be much better overall, and wouldn't be a terrible match for our stroller, which has quite a few grey accents on it. With that decided, we bought it, brought it home, assembled it, and took pictures of it.

I hope you have enjoyed the photographs and the thorough treatment of this subject.