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Outlook Shade-a-Babe
by paulie1975
We bought a shade a babe for £29.99 from Amazon more to cover summer holidays abroad than much risk from the UK sun. As such over the 30 months we've owned it we've probably only really used it on 11 or 12 occasions with three foreign trips and some unfeasibly hot, sunny days last summer.
The idea of the shade a babe is that ... on sunny days it protects your little one from the UV rays of the sun, it is a darkened cover that you place over your pushchair which means the little one can see out and you can see in but everything is darkened both ways.
My initial thoughts on this were that it was too large, too bulky and as our little one got bigger it was less practical and it almost felt a little cruel using it. In the first 12-15 months it was fine as baby was happy to lay there, sleep and lay there, so the shade a babe felt like protection, however once our little one reached 18 months it started to feel less like protection and more like an unnecessary restraint.
The shade a babe folds up and can be placed underneath your pushchair, it actually takes some force to fit it under our pushchair, which is a single baby jogger, and it is fairly bulky and doesn't slim down too much, I don't like this and it does discourage me from using it. To place it over the chair involves strategically tying the loose ends around various parts of the chair until it has covered the vulnerable areas from head to foot.
As our chair has a nice overbearing cover with a small plastic see through area I have always felt our little one has decent protection from overhead sun, this shade a babe has proven useful in the all encompassing sunshine of Gran Canaria and Cancun, but i'm not sure we gained too much from using it in the UK as I think the chair does a good enough job of providing protection.
For our little one, travel with this cover can now be frustrating, at a time when seeing things and interacting is everything, this restricts movement and interaction completely, people can't see in and we have to lift the shade a babe to check all is ok. Our child does become awfully grumpy whenever we use this now, knowing there won't be the chance to grab at things, point at dogs or enjoy walks in the way they generally do, which is a shame as sunny days are the best times to do this.
I don't like that and although I think this is a worthy purchase for the baby years I think it has a limited working life. We'll keep it in case we have another child and hopefully over the next few years we'll have plenty of sunshine and chances to use this, but overall my thoughts are that its overpriced by about £7-£10 for what it is, a darkened piece of plastic with tie ends. It is unfeasibly bulky and difficult to fold under the push chair and after a certain age begins to feel like a punishment rather than a way of protecting your child.
It does its job, but if you have a decent pushchair it doesn't do much more in mild UK weather than your chair can. I appreciate my views are entirely personal and the idea that it protects children from UV rays is a really worthy one, my point is I don't think on balance the protection it provides, particularly in the UK climate is worth the stress it causes our little one.
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