Oaki One Piece Rain/Boating Suit for Kids
Retail price: $49.99
Specs per manufacturer: This is the best built rain and boating suit available! It is designed to perform like a kayaking shell, and works great on the boat, in the rain, or anywhere. Dirt and mud wash off easily. Sizes run a little big. A 3T, for example,is meant to fit all the way through their 3rd year. OakiWear brand gear for kids is specially manufactured to be top quality, and comes with a 1 year warranty to guarantee performance and durability. Of course, it’s going to last A LOT longer than that!
Reviewer: Alex Price, Anchorage, Alaska
Findings: We had been dying to try these rain suits on our triplets. It was the end of Anchorage Alaska’s worst summer. It had rained 27 consecutive days. In a cold place where its residents need the few bits of sunshine in the summer it had been a cold and miserable season – perfect for a waterproof suit! As luck would have it the day the rain suits arrived they brought with them gorgeous fall weather, dry and cold. Here we were wishing for more misery and sunshine arrived.
The suits are colorful and seem well made. We got a red, a blue and a yellow one. The neck and wrists are elastic neoprene which made me wish my adult rain jacket had that feature. The ankles are elasticized too. The suit is roomy and fairly easy to get a kid in and out of with one long plastic zipper that zips from the neck to the top of the right knee. The knees appear to be reinforced. The hood is sewn outside the neoprene neck to keep water from running down the back. Unlike many kids clothes with a hood this one was big enough for my kids’ big head and didn’t come over his eyes either. It also has reflective tape on the chest which is a nice bonus living in Alaska where darkness envelops our world for so many months and you want your kids to be seen. One feature that I didn’t particularly care for was the ties on the hood. The ties hang freely from the bottom corners of the hood, but at over a foot long they got in the way. While their length made it easy for me to tie them together with my gloves on a little engineering could make them less cumbersome.
We ordered 2T suits for our 16 month old triplets, the smallest they had at the time, expecting them to be a little big, but they were too big. Their legs and arms kept ending up inside the roomy suits. We tried the suits instead on the triplets’ nearly three year-old older brother. The suit was a bit small on him but big brother loved it! Rolling in wet leaves and grass as well as being on the receiving end of a water hose did nothing to make our model even slightly wet the first time we tried them. Taking the rain suit out for another test run on a wet and super windy day we learned that suits are way better at ugly weather than a rain jacket and pants. First, rain jackets usually have large openings at the cuffs and neck. The Oaki rain suits’ tight elastic openings kept out the wind and water. The elastic waist made it so it didn’t bunch up, or fall down as might happen with pants or a jacket when sitting or being active. The one piece suit is great for crawlers too. It was nice that the suit allowed room for layers underneath as big brother reported being toasty warm as his parents were freezing next to him. And as mom and dad looked in dismay as their old jackets seemed to soak up the cold rain, the Oaki rain suit was doing a nice job of beading the water. Thanks to Alex and his 4 kids for this review!