first time mom here too, but I thought I’ll share my thoughts. My sister told me to get a baby cot pram second hand and after 6 ish months move to a small foldable stroller and get car seat separately as she could not be bothered with bulky and heavy travel system.
I didn’t listen and last week bought maxi-cosi oxford plus with pebble 360 car seat and base. I don’t plan on using car that much, maybe once or twice a week for bigger shopping and I want to be able to just put the car seat on the frame for when I just pop out to the shop. My boot is fairly small but the frame folds flat and is not that heavy to lift in and out.
Overall I hope it was a good decision 🤣 but I was lucky to be visiting family in Netherlands and visited quite a few baby shops where I’ve tried plenty of prams on display and got to fold, lift and inspect them thoroughly
Baby is three months. I’ve only attached the car seat to our chassis twice - baby doesn’t like the car seat enough to be happy in it for long and especially with winter coming we’re happy she’s cosy in her bassinet! We have the maxi cosy pebble 360 - we really like the 360 feature to turn her to get her out of the car and if we need to get to her from within the car, if that makes sense. TBH there’s only so much research you can do, we realised we just needed to pick something as we wouldn’t really know what we liked or disliked until we were using it in real life, and anything we disliked we’d just make do with until baby needs an upgrade - hence I’m counting down the days till we can justify upgrading her travel system (bought the bulky travel system on Facebook marketplace and now know exactly what I do and don’t want without having committed hundreds of pounds!)
FWIW we've just upgraded to Avionaut Stardust, which does have a separate insert to make it suitable from birth and should last her ERF til 6 then becomes a HBB.
*However* - it has been handy on occasion to bring baby into the house in her car seat, which just isn't really possible with the multi-stage ones as they're too heavy. NB we were using Maxi Cosi Pebble with 360base (very handy!!)
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