Max got his new seat this morning. I was happy as this meant we wouldn’t have to take the Camry which has a seat that will expire this month in it. This is a Britax Frontier 85 SICT.
I had already read the online owners manual and watched the video’s online on how to install the seat so I thought this would be easy, and it was… until something didn’t sit right with me.
We had installed the seat in the seat that Max was previously in in the car. We used latch. It took about 5 minutes and it was a very tight install. Then when we were out and about I noticed that it seemed the seat wasn’t back in the seat as far as it should be. So thinking it had to do with the seat not rebounding fully from the other carseat, I switched the carseat to the other seat in the second row of the minivan. I got it tight and promptly went to my favorite site to ask questions of car seat experts, questions about my install.
Well I forgot that it is a holiday weekend and no one replied to my message after several hours. So I did a search and found out that while Max’s last carseat had “super” latch. This current carseat doesn’t have that. To make it even MORE confusing, Honda has 40 lbs (child weight not carseat weight) limit on latch. However this isn’t in ANYTHING you have that comes with your Honda nor will they always tell you this if you were to call them. I was actually able to find several messages in my google search that showed that many people got the run around when inquiring about this issue however according to someone who actually talked to an engineer, the limit on the latch is 40 lbs.
So armed with this new information Tony and I went back out to the car to re-install the car seat yet a third time. This time we were using the vehicle’s seat belt. This isn’t an easy task and we fought with the seat to get it remotely tight. We were successful but the seat looks off kilter to me so I am thinking it may need to be done again.
This is an example of too much knowledge being a bad thing. Had I not thought that the seat looked “off” I would have thought that the seat was fine and installed properly. Not really paying much mind to any of the other safety issues. However now that I know better, I have to fix it. That fix is causing me to have massive headaches!
So in conclusion just like how we never really want to know what is in a hot dog, we may also never want to know how you should REALLY install a child safety seat, because honestly it is far worse then making a hot dog.
Jennifer