22 out of 22 people found this review helpful.
Horrible ergonomics & worthless adjustments!
Date of Review: Aug 22, 2004
The Bottom Line: Save your money and buy a Baby Bjorn! This Kelty may look more robust, but it can't hold a candle to the Bjorn in terms of ergonomics.
Even though it cost less than a Baby Bjorn, this carrier was the biggest waste of money we encountered as new parents!
Forget all of the features Kelty is touting. The people that designed this obviously never actually tried carrying a child in it.
We bought this unit along with a Baby Bjorn, intending to use it for our daily hikes, while the Bjorn would be reserved for more urbane, about-town activities.
Unlike the Bjorn, which was a snap to adjust, stayed put once adjusted, and fit our baby from birth untill she graduated to a (non-Kelty!) baby backpack, the Kelty Kangaroo fit neither parent nor child.
The problems start with the ill-conceived 2-piece harness / "baby-pod" construction. To put the pod on the baby, you need to disconnect it from the harness by undoing four separate buckles. You then need to disconnect two more buckles and two large velcro tabs to insert your baby in the pod. After putting on the adult half of the harness, you then need to reverse the entire procedure to secure the baby to your body.
By way of comparison, we could typically place our baby in the baby Bjorn and put the Bjorn on our bodies in three easy steps.
The next issue is that neither the baby pod nor the adult harness is designed with the human anatomy in mind. On the baby pod, by our baby's third month, the velcro tabs were no longer long enough to close the pod around our baby's legs & torso, so the rough side of the velcro was left exposed to rub directly on the child! Forget your child wearing shorts with the Kangaroo! (Our baby was a normal, healthy child who consistently measured at 75th percentile for length and weight.)
As for the harness, both my wife and I are of trim & athletic build (I'm 6'1", 170, and my wife is 5'9", 130), and neither of us could get the so-called "lower back" support to stay anywhere near our lower back once we'd cinched the baby securely to our chests.
The problem is once again with Kelty's absurdly complex & ineffective design. The nylon webbing straps that are sewn to the padded lower-back support run up your back, through loops on the padded shoulder straps, and allowed to slide freely as they extend over your shoulders and down to the baby pod.
This means that if you cinch down on these straps connecting to the top of the baby pod in front, the entire lower back support / waist belt assembly hikes right up your back.
All in all, the Kelty was utterly unsuitable for any sort of child-carrying purpose.
We threw it in the basement and just used the Baby Bjorn instead, since it had everything the Kelty did not: ergonomics, good looks, and simplicity in design & operation.
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