Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Reluctant Carseat

Well, it's not the carseat that's reluctant, to be fair. It's really Tom and me.

We finally ordered a third one. Oy- three. Can you believe it?


After much thought, I decided on the Diono Radian R100. I'm very happy with the Britax Marathon 70 that Abby is using now, and considered staying with the Britax brand, but Diono has a unique advantage. It appears to be narrower than any of the other convertible carseats out there. And at this point, just weeks away from being a mom of three, I'm trying to really look ahead to the future, and planning for flexibility in fitting my growing brood into one vehicle all at once (and hopefully still having a tiny bit of room for the occasional extra passenger). My only remaining qualm is whether I should have sprung for the R120. As its name implies, the R100 (once converted to a booster) will take a maximum weight of 100 lbs, whereas the R120 will go up to 120 lbs.

I honestly don't remember at what point I passed the 100 lb mark in my own childhood, but I have to think I was over 4'9" when it happened (the maximum required height to be in a booster, and the minimum height at which a car seat belt can properly restrain a passenger without one). I don't even want to think about the possibility that any of my children will pass the height max (and therefore the weight max) before reaching an appropriate age to graduate from the seat. Well, if that's the case for Abby, maybe it won't be for Michael. In any event, I'm quite sure this is not the last car seat/booster that we will be purchasing, as time goes on.

Supposedly, should we ever get around to having a Diono for each child, I would be able to fit three across in the back. Whether we'd ever want to do that, I don't know, though it would certainly make it easier for our occasional guest passengers to get in and out if we were finally able to free up the bucket seats in the middle of the van.

So far, I like the look of the seat, the reviews on Amazon were good, and it appears, for all intents and purposes, that it will allow for an easy install. I can't personally report on that yet, since the seat is currently sitting against a wall in our living room.

It's been a big hit with the kids thus far. When we first brought it out of the box, there was a bit of competition between the two of them over who would get to sit in/stand on it.



Luckily for Abby,  Michael eventually took more of an interest in the instruction manual, and she was free to take over the seat as she pleased.


I took these pictures on the 28th, so we are now on day three with a new piece of furniture in our living room. I guess that, at some point, we should move the thing into the car, where it belongs.

The plan is to put it in the middle of the back seat, facing forward. So then the question becomes: am I ready to turn my little Abigail (she's still happily rear-facing in her Britax Marathon)?

I don't think I ever will be. But that day is coming soon enough now, I suppose. If I haven't done it by the time Raspberry comes along... well, I won't have a choice, after that. Three babies; three carseats. The biggest to the biggest, and the smallest to the smallest. It's just math, right?