CrunchyMom's Guide to Car Seat Safety [Part Two]

In my last post I listed the most common car seat laws and safety guidelines in the United States.  In this post I will list more car seat safety tips and guidelines. 

Car seat safety has become even more important to me as yesterday I was in an accident with both my children and my fiance in the car.  After picking up my car from the "shop" where they replaced two of my tires and rotated all of them, I heard a bumpy noise upon leaving the parking lot.  I went to the gas station and then started back home.  The sound got worse and the steering wheel started moving on its own.  I slowed down to turn around and go back to the "shop" to have them check it out when my passenger side front tire flew off and across the sidewalk.  Luckily, we were going less than 15 mph, but had we been going any faster, it could have been bad.  Our seat belts and my children's car seats kept us from being thrown forward and to the right when the tire flew off.

Car Seat Safety Tips & Guidelines

• Never ever EVER alter your child safety seat in any way.  This includes but is not limited to:

1. Handmade or store bought custom car seat covers.  Sure they're cute, but they aren't safe.  Some manufacturers make different covers specifically for their car seats.  This is fine because it's made by the manufacturer FOR that particular car seat.
2. Head positioners.  If your car seat comes with a head positioner it's fine to use it.  You can also remove these as the car seat will have been tested with and without the positioner.  However, if your car seat didn't come with one, DO NOT add one.
3. Towels under harness straps.  I honestly wasn't aware of this one, but apparently it's among the bad advice given to parents.  Do not put ANYTHING between your child and the straps.
4. Some manufacturers consider toy bars to be dangerous and use of them will void your warranty.
 

• Make sure your car seats safety straps are adjusted properly for your child.  The rule (at least the one I have heard most often) is, if you're rear facing, the straps should be at the slot at or just underneath your child's shoulders and come up and over your child's shoulders.  If you're forward facing the straps should be at or just above your child's shoulders.

• Never use puffy jackets or snowsuits with car seats.  The rule is- if you have to adjust the straps to allow for the extra thickness of the jacket or snowsuit, it's dangerous.  Try a thinner but warmer jacket or just put your child in warm clothing, strap them in, put a blanket over their body, and bring the jackets and snowsuits with (for going between the car and your destination and/or emergencies in cold weather).  I know this one is harder for us mommas in colder climates, but it's safer.  Your child can be thrown out of their jacket and their car seat.  I've heard stories of children being thrown from the car seat but their jacket still being under the straps.

• This is one I don't understand, but I'm putting it here anyway, because it says so in my manual, and lots of mommas online brought this one to my attention as well.  When driving, make sure the handle on an infant seat is down (and clicked down too, not just haphazardly pushed down- I get on my fiance's case all the time about this one). 

• There should only be one inch or less of wiggle room at the bottom of the car seat or car seat base.

• Find a car seat that works for your child AND your vehicle.  Some car seats don't work too well in some vehicles.  For example, my daughters convertible car seat works great in my car, but it tilts and moves too much in my fiance's car.  Some stores will let you test out car seats before you buy.  Most will let you return a seat if it doesn't work for your child or vehicle.

• At least 80% of the car seats base should be on the vehicle's seat.

• Rear facing car seats should be at angled at 45 degrees or less.  This is so baby's head stays in contact with the seat and their airways are kept open.

• Use the pinch test to make sure the harness straps are tight enough.  You shouldn't be able to pinch the straps at the shoulder.

• In a five point harness seat, the clip should be at chest level, in between your child's armpits.

• Use either the cars latch system OR the seat belt to secure the car seat.  Do not use both.

• Car seats generally expire after six years.  Some expire after ten years, however.  Please make sure by checking the expiration date of your car seat.  A lot of seats will have the expiration date stamped on the bottom.

• Never buy or borrow a used car seat unless you are absolutely 100% sure of it's history.  People selling things online or in a garage sale want to make money and probably wont be completely honest with you about when they bought it or if it's ever been in an accident.

• Once your car seat has been in an accident, it's time to replace it.

• Check your car seat frequently for signs of wear or damage.

• Only add toys to a toybar that you would be comfortable having hit your child in the head or face.  Don't use hard toys.  Toys can injure your child in a crash.

• Learn to lock your seat belts to keep the car seat installed tightly.  

• Make sure you check the manufacturers instructions for cleaning your car seat.  Bleach and rough washing can damage straps, buckles, and other parts, and you want those parts working properly if you're in a crash.

• Frighteningly enough, some car seat experts have seen people using duct tape and bungee cords to repair car seats or replace parts of car seats.  I swear to God if any of you ever do this, or if I see anyone do this, I will literally explode and then haunt you for the rest of my life.

• Don't ignore the height and weight restrictions on your car seat.  If your child is too heavy, the straps can pull through.  If they're too tall, their heads wont be protected in a crash.

• If your child is tall, their legs bending or touching the back of the vehicles seat is NOT an excuse to switch to forward facing.  That being said, I do know a woman whose 10 month old daughter literally has to sit almost completely cross legged when rear facing.  I honestly can't find any information on what to do in that situation.  However, I'm fairly certain that this situation is extremely rare.

• Don't put car seats on grocery carts unless the cart has a system specifically meant to secure a car seat (apparently these exist, I've never seen any though).  Children have died when their parents hit a bump with the cart and the car seat falls off.

• Remember that anything loose in the car can be a potential hazard.  Got a case of soda on the seat?  Got an ice scraper in the back?  In a crash, anything can fly anywhere, so it's best to put these things in the trunk or rear of an SUV/MiniVan.

• An old and outdated rule is that you should be able to fit two fingers between your child and the seat belt or harness straps.  This is NOT true.  The belt and/or straps need to be tighter than that.  Use the pinch test to determine if the straps are tight enough.

• If you use your vehicles latch system, read your vehicles manual to make sure you know the weight limits and guidelines for using this system!  Different vehicles have different guidelines so make sure you know the guidelines for YOUR vehicle.

• The safest place for a car seat is in the middle of the back seat.  However, it's more important that the car seat be properly installed.  If the seat can be more safely installed on a "window seat" then put it there.  And obviously if you have more than one child, you can't do this.  I have two children and always put the youngest in the middle.

• Always wear your own seat belt to be a good example for your children.

• I asked for input on Facebook and one lovely woman said:  RYDM!  (read your damn manual)  I really like this, so I will repeat her advice, RYDM!

The most important thing I can add to this list is:  If you're confused or unsure, find a car seat tech and have the seat properly installed and have them show you how to install it correctly!

Remember that contrary to popular belief, most police officers and firefighters are NOT trained in car seat safety.  Always have your seat installation checked out by a certified car seat technician.

CrunchyMom's Guide to Car Seat Safety [Part One]

Car seat safety is a big deal among crunchy parents.  Everyone is talking about car seat safety, and jumping down other mother's throats when it comes to this issue.  For those of you who feel overwhelmed with all the car seat nazi talk going around, I've constructed this article which includes all the car seat safety tips and laws that I can find.

Car Seat Laws & Guidelines

• All children should be in an appropriate car seat or booster seat until they are 4 feet 9 inches tall and 80-100 pounds.  Most children will reach these limits between 8-12 years of age.

• Children 12 years of age and under must remain in the back seat of the car at all times.

• Infant style car seats are best for small infants and are usually usable from 4-5 pounds (birth-weight) until 20-22 pounds.  Different manufacturers have different guidelines, so please use this only as a general idea and CHECK YOUR CAR SEAT MANUAL for actual guidelines.  

• Convertible car seats are generally considered the safest option.  They usually can be used rear facing from birth to 20-22 pounds and forward facing from 20 pounds to 40-65 pounds depending on the model.  Try to get a seat with the highest rear and forward facing limits that you can both find and afford.

• Federal law says that children must remain rear facing until age one AND 20 pounds as a minimum.  New rear facing guidelines recommend rear facing your child until two years of age.  Because of these new recommendations, some convertible seats are now able to be used in a rear facing position until much higher weights.  Check your model for manufacturers guidelines and limits regarding weight/height recommendations.

• The guidelines for booster seats are usually age four, and 40 pounds or more.  However, if your child can still ride safely in his/her convertible seat, that is the best option.  From car-safety.org : "If a child's shoulders are above the level of the top slots in their regular car seat, or the tops of their ears are above the top of the shell, then they may be able to move to a booster or another forward-facing seat which accommodates taller children.  Usually a child can be moved to a booster when they are too big for a harnessed car seat, and once they are able to sit properly in a seat belt."

• When your child is using a booster seat, the seat belt must be used properly.  Do not put the shoulder belt under their arm or behind their back.  Also, make sure the lap belt rests across their hips, not the soft part of their stomach.  You must use both the lap belt and the shoulder belt with a booster seat.

• Owners of pickup trucks that don't have an extended cab or in which the extended cab is too small or incompatible with a child safety seat can legally have their child's car seat in the front seat of the truck.  However, the passenger air bag must be turned OFF when there are children riding in the front of the truck. 

• Your child is ready to use a seat belt without a booster seat when they can pass the Safety Belt Fit Test.

The Safety Belt Fit Test [from safekids.org]

• Have your child sit in a back seat with their bottom and back against the vehicle’s seat back.  Do the child’s knees bend at the seat’s edge?  If yes, go on. If not, the child must stay in a booster seat.
• Buckle the seat belt.  Does the lap belt stay low on the hips?  If yes, go on.  If it rests on the soft part of the stomach, the child must stay in a booster seat.
• Look at the shoulder belt. Does it lay on the collarbone and shoulder? If yes, go on. If it is on the face or neck, the child must remain in a booster seat.
  
  
  • Never put the shoulder belt under the child’s arm or behind the child’s back. Do not allow children to play with the shoulder portion of a seat belt. Treat it like any cord.
• Can the child maintain the correct seating position with the shoulder belt on the shoulder and the lap belt low across the hips? If yes, the child has passed the Safety Belt Fit Test. If no, the child should return to a booster seat and re-test in a month.  

Don't forget to read Part Two of my car seat safety series!

Sibling Rivalry

Fighting for bed space.

Download Drama (aka my daughter charged $40 worth of fishbucks to our phone bill on the Android Market to play TapFish)

Do you have a fish tank on your Android phone? A farm on Facebook? Have you become a little addicted to Angry Birds?

I'm sure there are a lot of you raising your hands or hiding behind your computer screens right now.  Apps are fun and best of all, most of them are free.  Of course they have the option to buy extra credits or coins or fishbucks, but they really aren't necessary to play.
Would someone please tell that to my four year old?

Miss Aria was playing TapFish on my beautiful Android phone (I love this phone almost as much as I love my cats), when she decided she wanted to buy a mermaid.  We didn't have enough FishBucks to buy the mermaid so she so thoughtfully got us some more. 

Forty dollars worth to be exact. Charged to our phone bill.

Yipee!

At least I got the mermaid though.

How do I get any work done with a baby and a (jealous) four year old?

Today has been an interesting day.  Parker, my 11 week old, is teething (at least I'm fairly certain he's teething), drooling everywhere, running a bit of a fever, and is about as cranky as a baby can be.  Aria, my four year old daughter, is in full blown jealousy mode.  She whines and complains about the amount of time I spend feeding and holding her brother.

My question of the day...

How do I get any work done in this situation?  How do you guys do it?  How do you handle jealousy between siblings?  And how do you handle teething?

Please feel free to share suggestions and ideas in the comments below.



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Attachment Parents & Helicopter Parents: Not Necessarily One In The Same

I love attachment parenting.  I love cuddling with my four year old when she's having a bad day.  I love sleeping next to my 8 week old at night.  I'm terrified of SIDS.  I'm also terrified something bad will happen to my kids, even if it's just a scraped knee. 

But I'm not so terrified that I don't let them out of my sight.

A not-so-new and not-so-fun trend in parenting is Helicopter Parenting.  Imagine a parent hovering over their child constantly, even into the college years, taking care of every problem the child ever has.  That is helicopter parenting.  And it's something I am against entirely, possibly more than I am against letting babies "cry it out".

At least with cry it out (which I desperately hate) parents are giving their children breathing room.  The helicopters don't.  It starts with never leaving baby alone, even for a second, because they might roll off the blanket on the floor onto the actual floor, pick up a stray piece of dirt or cat hair, put it in their mouth, possibly even swallow it, get incredibly sick, and/or die.  It ends with parents sitting in on post-college job interviews with their kids and then calling the company to yell at them for not hiring sweet little Johnnykins.  After all, mommy was there during the interview and saw how wonderfully Johnnykinsybabywabysweetiepie did answering those questions (after turning to mom to figure out how to answer first of course). 

These things really happen.  There are parents that end up at job interviews with their 22 year old "kids".  And it starts out of fear.  I'm no stranger to fear.  I have severe (albeit treated) OCD.  I'm terrified that my kids will die if I don't use exactly 9 squares of toilet paper.  I feel the most comfortable when my children sleep in my bed with me so I know that if anything happens I will be right next to them.  But I know that a lot of my fears are irrational. 

As Lenore Skenazy of Free Range Kids often points out, crime is actually DOWN since most parents were kids (I'm a bit younger than a lot of parents so I'm not sure if those statistics fit me).  And it's common knowledge that most child abductions and child sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone the child KNOWS.  Yet we live in a world of fear.  Parents accompany their kids outside to play and stay within two feet of them at all times in their own back yards.  Parents drive their kids to school so that they aren't subjected to peer pressure, bullying, or the male driver (because all men are child molesters) on the bus.  Parents don't let their children play with their friends across the street because obviously a 10 year old has no concept of how dangerous cars are and will dart right out into traffic if mommy or daddy isn't paying constant, vigilant, attention.

How does this relate to crunchy, attachment parenting parents?  When you think about attachment parenting and some of the crunchier practices that often go right along with it, it's a fairly easy gateway to helicopter parenting.  Making sure children aren't exposed to toxins, breastfeeding to prevent illness, babywearing, and co sleeping can all lead to overprotective parenting.  You keep your children so close as babies and toddlers it's hard to stop when they get older. 

The reason children are born, grow, and get older is to eventually turn into adults.  The reason we (well I hope this is the reason) choose attachment parenting is to develop a good relationship with our children, to make sure they feel secure and safe, and so that they (hopefully) grow into well adjusted, productive, happy adults.  While being close to your children is important in their upbringing, so is letting them have freedom to make mistakes.  Mistakes are a big part of how we, as humans, learn and grow.  The great part about attachment parenting is that, because of the good relationship you worked so hard to have with your children, they will come to you when they make those mistakes and get themselves in over their heads.  But they need to be free to make those mistakes first.

Even in my constant OCD fueled fear, I know that my children are people, not possessions to be protected and locked away like a precious piece of jewelry in a museum.  While they are precious and infinitely valuable to me, they are still people.  We, as parents, and especially as attachment parents, need to know where to draw the line at our attachment.  The umbilical cord gets cut for a reason. 

My oldest child is a beautiful, creative, brilliant, and very adventurous four year old girl named Aria.  Aria is very much the poster child for attachment parenting.  We used the methods of attachment parenting with her, not because it was a trendy thing to do (in fact, we didn't know attachment parenting existed until she was about three), but because those particular methods worked for us.  In the midst of a very ugly battle with post partum depression, co sleeping and babywearing made me feel close to my baby and thus made me feel better.  For the longest time I couldn't stand to sleep without her at night or be separated from her at work. 

However, as most children inevitably do, she began to grow up.  We moved into an amazing neighborhood full of children of all ages, and she, of course, wanted to play with them.  The fully fenced in back yard that we were so excited about having, so she could play safely without us constantly watching over her, lay dormant (until Plankton the Jackabee and a pumpkin garden entered our lives, but that's another post) while she played with the neighbor kids in the front yard, near the (gasp) street.  She soon made friends with the kids across the street, so, with a little street crossing education, she began to play in their yards as well. 

Now my (not so little) baby girl wakes up in the morning, and instead of waking us up, she gets herself dressed (she has a great sense of style too), let's the dog out, grabs a snack, let's the dog back in, and goes on her little way, outside and across the street to play with her friends. 

She's four years old.

If my four year old can handle this huge chunk of independence, I'm fairly certain 22 year old Johnnykins can make it through a job interview alone.  The difference between an independent child like mine and an extremely dependent adult-child like Johnykins comes down to one thing.  It's not personality (Aria is painfully shy at times), and it's not intelligence (although she does have that- from her momma of course).  It's simply the fact that I, as a parent, have allowed and encouraged my daughter to stake out her own independence, even when what I really wanted to do was hold her on my lap and watch Barney like we did in the old days, and poor little Johnnykins' mom, did not. 

Trick Or Treat - - - No Boobs To Eat?

Today I grappled with the age old dilemma most parents face at some point or another during the adventure that is parenting.

How  the do you keep a breastfed baby happy while trick or treating with older children?

It seems like it wouldn't be too hard really, but let me tell you.  It is.  Older kids RUN from house to house, cutting through yards, leaping over landscaping, and pushing each other to get to the front of the line at each door with a lit porchlight and a pumpkin on the doorstep.  Babies don't run.  They demand to be fed when THEY want to be fed.  They don't care that their preschool aged sisters want to cram as much free candy into a pillowcase as they possibly can.  And preschool aged sisters don't care that their baby brothers want to stop and drink some Momma Milk.

We feed our son (who experienced his first Halloween at the ripe old age of not-quite-eight-weeks-old) the occasional bottle of formula.  So we thought we'd be ok.  Until we ran out of formula in a cul-de-sac fifteen minutes away from home (and the emergency can of Similac).  Our children also tend to dislike pacifiers, and the adorable generic Nemo one we brought was locked in the diaper bag in the car several culs-de-sac away (yes the plural of cul-de-sac IS, in fact, culs-de-sac).

So needless to say, by the end of the night, after a lot of butt patting, finger sucking, empty bottle nipple sucking, and cuddly bouncy walking, we (and by we I mean my husband and my best friend who took turns carrying the baby while I carried the candy bags- for security purposes of course) were exhausted and Parker was ready for some DAMNED MOMMA MILK!  If babies could talk, I'm fairly certain he would have screamed those exact words.

Next year he will be a year old.  He will probably go more than 30 minutes between feedings.  So any advice you can give me on this topic is moot for him.  However, what happens when we have another tiny baby joining us on our Trick Or Treating Extravaganza ( we were the first to start at 5pm and the last out at 9pm)?  So I've decided to throw out a few ideas I thought of after we were warm in our home for the night.

@  Learn to walk and breastfeed at the same time.  (I figured this one out right as we were hitting our last house of the night- Grandma & Papa's.)

@  Figure out a way to force the older children to take breaks. (Please tell me how in the comments section.  Please!)

@  Make sure you bring not just one bottle of formula or expressed milk, but two... or three... or maybe twenty.

Of course, I'm fairly certain that not all parents take their kids (and the neighbors kids, and the old neighbors kids) Trick Or Treating for FOUR, eff-ohhh-yooo-arr, FOUR hours straight.  But those who don't are definitely jealous of baby Parker's candy stash.

And since baby Parker is only 8 weeks old and he can't really eat candy...  He will be having Reese's, Kit Kat, and Hershey flavored breastmilk (without interruption) for the next few weeks.  :)

So, if any of you lovelies out there have any tips/suggestions/ideas on how to deal with breastfeeding and non-stop trick or treating, please, for the love of God (or whomever you choose to fill in that blank with), please, PLEASE, feel free to share in the comments!


Oh, and in case you were wondering, Parker was a Banana for Halloween.