The evil stroller

I dredged up this story when I read Bookseller Chick today--she talked about strollers as The Enemy. Yes, I, too, have loathed a stroller.

When I was preggers with boy 3, my friends got together and bought us a fabulous jogger stroller. It was used, but just barely. A primo machine. It sort of looked like this, only more stripped down. That thing was nimble and super fast--made for athletes so it didn't have a handy little basket underneath or brakes.

Know where I'm going with this already?

The boy was born in February and I soon discovered that the fab stroller actually worked in snow, unlike any stroller I'd ever owned (and by boy 3, I'd owned a lot of those things. I hated driving and we lived downtown in a compact little city. Could walk everywhere to anything).

One day, the baby and I dropped boy 2 at preschool and walked home. He fell asleep so I pulled the stroller onto the front porch. As I turned to put the key in the door lock, the stroller, that nimble lil thing without brakes, rolled backwards. Before I could turn around to catch it, the thing had bumped down the stairs. It crossed the sidewalk and was in the street before I caught up.

We lived on a fairly busy street back then, but the gods were on my side that day.

I unbuckled the still sleeping baby. I opened the car door and carefully put him in his car seat. And then I beat the holy shit out of the stroller.
I kicked it.
I hit it.
I think I bit the padded handle.
I had never before or since ever so completely needed to kill a thing (or person). I only stopped beating on the stroller when a car passing me slowed down and someone rolled down the window. Grabbing the baby, I fled the scene, leaving the damn stroller on the sidewalk. I dragged it inside later.

After that . . .well, everyone else who used it probably wondered why the stroller never really worked as well as those fancy machines were supposed to.

If you're one of my good friends who gave me that great present, sorry. But someone had to pay for almost killing my baby and I wasn't into beating myself up.