Nearly eighteen months ago, my husband and I decided to get rid of our bulky travel system and buy a lightweight pushchair, as our baby was over 6 months old and could manage with less padding and didn't need to recline as fully. Now, generally speaking, we're not fussy people but when it came to choosing a new pushchair we had a list of requirements as long as your arm! This was our second baby and we now knew exactly what we needed to see the baby through to toddlerhood and were determined to get it!

As stated, we didn't necessarily want a pushchair that laid totally flat, as our baby was over 6 months old when we bought it. Nonetheless, just like most babies, ours spends most of his time in his pushchair fast asleep, bless him. We looked at the Quinny Zap, which has a similar look to the Petite Star Zia, but it is just too upright for my liking. Babies I've seen in them just don't look too comfortable when they're fast asleep with their heads lolling about!

Our final restriction was the budget - we were looking to spend around the £100 mark and for that we also wanted a raincover included (as I didn't want to get a bargain pushchair and then fork out another £30 on a raincover!)

Okay - I've given the ending away there. Yes, we did buy the pushchair there and then as we were just so pleased to find a pushchair that had everything we wanted. At the time, the RRP was £99, so bang on budget, although we did have to pay extra for the footmuff and I'd say that was pretty much an essential for the pushchair. Now, the Zia retails for slighter more but you can often find discount codes for Mothercare on the web, which will bring the price down slightly. Even at an RRP of around £150, I'd say that it is still great value for money.

The biggest irritation that you notice very quickly, is the shopping basket. It's so small, it's almost worse than useless. It just about fits in the raincover (supplied with the pushchair, incidentally) but only if you're an expert at origami and fold it up with expert precision. Dare to fold it in a hurry and you'll never fit that raincover into the tiny basket! There's no chance of getting anything else into that basket, believe me. Getting the raincover out when you need it (which is quite often given the British weather) was also a work of art - until I discovered that there are actually little hooks at the back so that you can unclip the fabric basket and remove it. You don't actually need to wrestle with the basket in the pouring rain - oops!

I've also had occasions when the brake just seizes up and won't unlock. This has only started happening over the past couple of months but happens fairly frequently now and does get very irritating! Fair enough, you don't tread on it accidentally as it works from a lever at the side of the wheel, rather than a bar across the length of the pushchair. The only other thing I can remember is that one of the wheels has actually come off on two occasions when the pushchair has been in use. Obviously, it 's been used on hundreds of occasions so it isn't something that happens regularly and the wheels are designed to just slot on and off, but you don't really want that to happen.