The Financial Impact of Car Seat Issues
September 14, 2009 – 6:30 amMy wife and I were blessed by receiving car seats at one of our baby showers, and we installed them this past weekend. The problem is they barely fit. And I do mean barely. My wife drives a Ford Focus, and I have a 1990 Honda accord. We tried the car seats in both cars, and both are very tight.They are so tight that it will be uncomfortable to drive more than 30-45 minutes currently.
I originally expected my Honda to fit the car seats better, since it is a larger car. It’s a 2-door though, and it’s hard just getting the carrier portion of the car seats in with the front seat all the way forward. Apparently you’re not supposed to tilt them 90% with the kid inside to fit in the car. 
The good news is that once the kids are big enough to face forward the car seats should fit a bit better. It ’s the head portion of the seats that tends to fan out a bit and touch the back of the front seat. When the kids are seated forward that portion of the car seat will have a bit more space due to the reclining nature of the back seats and should give us several more inches.
So what are the implications?
- we’re going to do everything we can to make this work. We can’t afford to buy a new (used) car at the moment. I can suffer anything for a year to avoid buying a different car so soon.
- My car has a standard transmission, so my wife can’t drive it anyway. Therefore even if the car seats fit better in the Honda it wouldn’t help much during the week.
- We now know that there is no way we can fit 3 seats in either car. That means another kid = minivan for us. Not that this will stop us. It’s just good to set expectations.
- If we have someone stay come visit they is not enough room for them to ride in between the two car seats in either car. Therefore we’d need to take two cars when either of our mothers come to visit.
- We didn’t really shop around for car seats due to size. We bought a standard model of Graco car seats (or I should say our relatives did based on what we picked out). It would have been nice to have measured first though.
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3 Responses to “The Financial Impact of Car Seat Issues”
Oh, how I can relate to this… We already had a 1.5 year old and a Ford Focus (which we had for about 6 months) when we found out we were having twins. “WHY did we buy a Focus?” was one of the first things we asked ourselves! We crammed three car seats into our other car (a Chevy Lumina with LOTS of miles on it), but after loading the double stroller and diaper bag in the car, there just wasn’t room for ANYTHING else. After about a month of that, we caved and got a “new” mini-van. It made our lives SOOOO much better.
Good luck with those little ones!
By Christina @ Northern Cheapskate on Sep 14, 2009
You might want to see when the local police are doing a car seat inspection. Turns out most of us are installing them wrong to begin with and they can help, maybe they’ll find a little extra room.
By Aftercancer on Sep 19, 2009