Buying Lilly Gold 5-in-1 Sit n Stroll Carseat / Stroller, Shoreline

We purchased these for our year-old twin boys. I really really wanted this product to be great, and I was so excited to try it. I thought it would really be an answer to our problems traveling but unfortunately it wasn't. Everyone who's done it knows what a difficult thing it is to bring a car-seated baby on an airplane, in terms of getting it hefted up and over everyone's heads and down the aisle (while you're probably carrying a couple of diaper bag carry-ons as well). In our experience (and we fly American), they do not let us pre-board at all, even with two infants. This seems crazy to me, and it makes it very difficult for my husband and me, each with a car seat and baby in our arms, to get down the jetway and finally seated on the plane.

This stroller is easy to push around the airport - though the handle does seem really flimsy. But there is no storage, and you can't really hang your diaper bags on the handle - you'll need to keep those shouldered. If your adult-to-baby ratio is 1:1 like it is with us (my husband has one baby and I have the other), a rolling suitcase in addition to your sit-n-stroll doesn't really work either.

I was very hopeful that the sit-n-stroll would roll down the aisle of the plane. It won't, not in coach. Not even close. So somehow you have to pick this seat up, which is very unwieldy, very high (and I am very tall) to get over people's heads, with your shoulder bags on, and get to your seat. It's really a stressful experience and we typically wind up feeling somewhat injured - too much strain on our necks, our backs, and bruises on our arms. Getting the wheels to pop out and back isn't TOO difficult, but everything is made somewhat more difficult by the stress of all the travelers around you being unhappy about you bringing your baby aboard in the first place. Oh well. ;-)

Another problem is that this car seat is pretty heavy (compared to the Graco Safe Seat for Infants which is what we used before), even without a child in it. When you add a 20+ pound child, it's really too much for me. I'm 6'1" and my husband is 6'5" and we both did not like using the sit-n-stroll. Our experience was also that the seat is wider than the airplane seat itself, so the parent riding next to the seat will have less space to sit in than normal.

If you do use the car seat in the rear facing mode, the airplane's seatbelt fits at a comfortable level. If you use it in the forward facing manner, though, the plane's seatbelt goes somewhere else (higher up), and it really is in a weird spot. How awkward it is will depend on the height of your child.

For our next trip, we are going back to our former system - the Graco Safe Seat rear-facing (for infants) car seat (the boys are barely within the weight / height range for that seat still) with the Graco frame stroller (folded up and checked at the plane's door) to get it around the airport. That car seat has a handle, so it's easier to heft up over people's heads, and it does not weigh as much. And then we hope that we can graduate to the cares belt on future trips. That's another conversation :-)

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this seat. It just has too many drawbacks, and it is VERY expensive.
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