The Car Seat

 -Tyce

Anita has been the primary driver of making sure that we have all of the stuff that we need to take care of foster children. As soon as we made the decision to pursue this, she was thinking about what we may need and looking on Facebook Marketplace for deals. I am exceptionally happy about this, because if it were left up to me there would probably be a lot of midnight runs to Meijer or Wal-mart for things that it would never occur to me that we would need.

Booster seats when I was a kid.

One of the first things that she looked into was car seats. I grew up before car seats for children was a thing. The only one I ever used was a plastic “restaurant style” booter seat designed for kitchen chairs, and we only used it so that I could sit high enough to see out the window. Our cars only had lap belts anyway, and if you actually used the belt then you were a sitting duck for the random aggressions of a certain older brother (you know who you are, and yes, I probably deserved it).

If you are not familiar with the modern car seat, they are complicated! You need different types of seats for different ages, they have a relatively short recommended lifespan, and they should be replaced if you have been in any kind of accident. Because of the last two factors, we decided that this was definitely something that we should buy new. So Anita spent hours of time researching them.

Because we won’t know the size and age of the children we will be fostering, we decided on a universal age convertible car seat. They can be used for any age from a rear-facing bringing-a-newborn-home to just a backless booster fit for a 7 year old. She opted for a delux model, that even has two cupholders!

After she picked out her favorite, she saw that, low-and-behold, they are even on sale! We were still at least 6 months away from being licensed, but this kind of deal was a once-a-year thing. So we decided to pull the trigger and buy two. After announcing the decision to family, Anita’s wonderful brother and sister-in-law said that they would buy them for us as a shower gift. A few days later, they arrived. We had not started training; we didn’t have a licensing agent; but we had car seats!. At that moment it started to become real (at least for me). We were going to do this.

That was at the end of April. The car seats remained unopened in their boxes. The boxes moved from the living room into the front bedroom (catch-all storage). When we turned the bedroom into a toddler’s room they moved to the master bedroom (the new catch-all storage). When we organized the master into the new office/library/guest bedroom, the boxes moved into the closet. And there they sat for months, ignored, as the licensing process dragged on.

Recently, we offered to baby-sit for a family at church while the parents attended an after-church activity in the evening. We would take their kids to their home after church, feed them dinner, and put them to bed. Their youngest child still needs to use a car seat. They offered to just loan us theirs for the evening, and we said no because I figured that this was a great opportunity to learn to use our own.

NASCAR approved!

On Sunday morning after church, I finally unboxed one of the car seats. These things are huge! With the 5 point harness and padded seat and headrest it looks like it belongs in the back of a NASCAR. Each side is full of colorful stickers that look like corporate logos from a distance as well. I looked in the box for a HANS device but, sadly, those are special order. Baby Dale Darryl Richard Rusty Earnhardt Petty Johnson Jr. is going to love this thing.

However, we are not taking home Baby Dale, but rather transporting a 6 year old. So we need to figure out how to convert it from baby’s-first-drag-race to a booster seat. These things are complicated! There are straps and buckles everywhere. The instruction manual is 70 pages long. There is even a slot in the back of the seat to slide in the manual so that you don’t lose it. Genius.

I am usually the kind of guy who likes to play with something to figure it out, rather than look at the booklet. After about 5 minutes of just staring at it, however, I had to go to the book. After about 10 minutes of paging through the book, we decided to ask the all-knowing guru — Youtube!

(As a side note, I played video games a lot as a kid. One of the games involved a quest to find a scroll that was hidden away that magically contained all of the sum of human knowledge. Today we have access to that scroll with the internet. Isn’t it just amazing to think about?)

Thirty minutes and two videos later, we had it converted! It may be convertible, but it is not a quick-change. There are a lot of flaps and tabs and straps to move and adjust. I proudly brought it out to the car.

Fortunately, I think to myself, since we are using it as a booster we don’t need to (yet) figure out how to connect the latch straps; we can just use the standard seat belt. Then I tried to use the standard seat belt. Since belts connect from the outside wall of the car inward you have to reach over and around the car seat (and child) to connect and disconnect them. Old hat for you parents out there, but a new surprise for me. It is even more fun when the child is actively trying to “help”.

Detroit should really design cars for parents of young children. They could reverse the seat belts so that the latch is on the door side, make the rear interior out of some solid vinyl that you can hose down, and install a floor drain. Maybe the deluxe model would have the sliding window to close off the back seat like in limos. I think that they would sell like hotcakes.

The baby-sitting mission went well and the car seat performed admirably for the entire 1.9 mile drive from church to their home. After we got home we reattached the back (thank you again, Youtube) and decided to leave this one in the forward facing position. We will probably use it again for baby-sitting before we are licensed, and even if not then we have one set up each way so that we are ready to go for the day that we get the call.