Car Seat Ratings

Car Seat Ratings - Car Seat Safety Quiz

There is a really good Car Seat Safety Quiz on About.com in their pediatrics section. Give it a try!

Ease Of Use Car Seat Ratings

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has an interesting video and section on Ease of Use Car Seat Ratings for 2008. You can find the website here.

Car Seat Ratings - Car Seat Timeline

I took a look at Consumer Reports to see if they have posted their latest Car Seat Ratings article, but it seems thay haven’t.

I did find this Consumer Report’s article on how to determine when you need to move up to the next size car seat.

Car Seat Ratings - On YouTube!!!!

Check this out - people are posting car seat ratings and reviews on YouTube. The are actually pretty cool. They go through each of the features and capabilities of the car seat. You get to see what they are talking about. Here is an example. Make sure you look at the other similar videos on the right hand side.

I am constantly amazed at the amount of information that you can find out there!

Phenominal Car Seat Ratings Forum

If you are looking for car seat ratings, or just general information on car seats, check out this online forum - www.car-seat.org. It has every thing you would ever want to know (and stuff you really NEED to know) about car seats. No B.S. just great information.

S.E.A.T.S - not car seat ratings, but car seat checking!

I am going to take a break from talking about car seat ratings to talk about something else that is really important to me. I am really happy to see that more and more communities are getting together to create programs to check car seats. Check out this article on a program in Reno, NV called S.E.A.T.S. (Safety Education and Training Services). We don’t have anything like that here, but I am thinking about talking with our local government about implementing one.

(Watching the Olympic closing ceremony while typing this…is that not amazing!)

Car Seat Ratings - cont.

I have some more Car Seat Ratings info. While looking at the NHTSA site, I found a link that shows Car Seat recall notices, and Customer Complaints. You can find it here.

-Mike

Car Seat Ratings - a cautionary tale

“You’re an idiot…” she said.

Ok… already this conversation was not going the way I expected it to go.

It started innocently enough. My very pregnant wife and I were sitting at our kitchen table, she, reading the local paper, and me, trying to balance the checkbook in Quicken. She looked up at me and said, “Don’t you think it’s time to start looking for a car seat?

Now, in the six years that I have known my wife, including the three before we got married, she has never once ask me to do anything directly. It is usually, “Honey, I think the air is a little low in my tires”, or “Sweetie, I think the kitchen garbage is starting to smell”, or “Mike, is my laptop supposed to make that noise?” Usually, I would call her on it and force her into actually asking me to do whatever it was she wanted done, or I would tell her to do it herself in cases where she was perfectly able to do so; but then, as fate would have it, she got pregnant…

It is at this point in my story, that I will start referring to my wife by describing her in her current embodiment, Psycho-Hormonal Wife (PHW).

As I said before, if she indirectly asked me to do something, I would call her on it and I would then get “OK, Please take out the kitchen garbage, now! ” there was an unsaid, but implicit “Or Else!” which usually meant…well you can pretty much figure out what that usually meant.

That was then.

Eight months into the pregnancy, in one of the hottest summers on the record books, and after bouts of morning sickness where I’m sure she lost at least one lung, the experience has honed her into a finely tuned, lethal, instrument of destruction, and God help anyone or anything that got in her way.

When I am perceptive enough to recognize it’s the hormones talking, I don’t talk back…I don’t even make eye contact…it senses fear…

This leads me to this morning’s conversation:

PHW: “Don’t you think it’s time to start looking for a car seat?”

Me: “Uh, yeah, I guess we should, which one do we need to get?”

PHW: “You’re an idiot…”

Me: “excuse me?”

PHW: “How the heck should I know? Go on the internet and Google “Car Seat Ratings”. Then do the research.”

Since I was at my laptop, I pulled up Google and entered “Car Seat Ratings” I found the the Governments NHTSA website (I put the link below if anyone is interested), and they had some good information. I told her what I found:

Me: “Honey, I found the NHTSA’s website; there’s some really good information here.”

PHW: “Does it tell you if people actually like the car seat?”

Me: “Uh…no”

PHW: “You’re an idiot…”

At this point I was wondering what the weather was like this time of year in Costa Rica, and if there were any direct flights…

PHW: “Go to Amazon, look up “car seat”, and see from the car seat ratings what people actually think of the car seats they have there.”

So I did; There was a lot of good information (I have included the link to Amazon’s car seat offerings at the end of my post, below).

Me: “Ok… I think we got the car seat thing handled, there are some here that I think are easy enough that you can operate them”

PHW: “…”

Because there is the possibility that sensitive people and minors may be reading this, I will not relay the stream of words that came from her mouth.

In my defense, I had not yet had my morning coffee and I still had issues with an imbalance of $21.33 in the checking account, so my brain and mouth were not entirely in sync.

Needless to say, my next two Amazon searches were here and here.

I will keep you up to date on the car seat we eventually select and order. I will also let you know how the rest of the pregnancy goes.

- Mike

P.S. As promised…

NHTSA Car Seat Ratings

Amazon Car Seat Ratings