Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Car seats


One of the joys of having grandchildren around the house these days is that if we want to take them out anywhere, we have to make sure we've got a car seat available. When our kids were small, car seats were unheard of, pretty much. We used to strap them in with the seat belts and go for it. At least we did once seat belts became the norm.
These days anyone with kids under five or six will be forced to have a bulky car seat permanently in their car taking up room. Now, don't get me wrong, I think car seats are a good idea, and in general I'm sure they've saved more lives than not, but they are a blinking nuisance as well.
If you want to go out with a small child, and don't have their car seat already in the car (because it's not your small child, but your son's or daughter's) you can bank on needing to get ready to leave at least ten minutes before your normal departure time, because it will take you that long to figure out how to get the car seat fitted into your car. Worse if it's one of these really fancy models, a Britax, or some other brand. Some of them require additional seat belt arrangements, apart from what you've already got. We seem to spend a good deal of time at our house these days swapping car seats from one car to another, just in order to transport small persons hither and yon.
Things being what they are, it's probably not far down the track that we'll have to start strapping elderly persons into specially made car seats, and then a few years later, strapping ourselves into them. That's if we can figure out what we're doing....

The model in the picture is a Britax Diplomat Convertible Car Seat. Puleeese.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice post!! Car seat is the most important thing that we would need when traveling using our car.