Baby Car Seat

Parenting Challenges 101: The Zip Ties

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I’m blogging more in February because (a) it’s fun and (b) I realize a lot of parents, especially new parents, have concerns about “How well am I doing?” I work with parents all the time as a night nurse, so I try to alleviate some of those concerns on the site where I can. I decided to do a series of 3-4 posts around parenting challenges that I’ve encountered. This is the first one. Why is this stuff important? Because a lot of times we only talk to our immediate friends or neighbors and we have no idea the struggles that others go through. So, when we ourselves go through struggles? We think we’re super weird and off-task. We’re not. It’s very normal to struggle as a parent, whether it’s the first time or the fifth time. Here’s one such story.

When my daughter was two…

… getting her in the car seat was a nightmare. We’d be wrestling with her. I mean like — wrestle to get her in the car, then wrestle again to get her in the seat, and finally put my elbow near her crotch to essentially pin her down and get her in the seat. This was a daily, or sometimes thrice-daily, occurrence for the better part of a year. Think about this when you think about having kids. They are great and provide your life with a lot of meaning and purpose, but there are also a lot of crotch-drop elbow shots when they are two years old.

For various reasons including this, I actually stopped going to the gym when my daughter was two. This was a major workout and I sometimes would sweat profusely. Gym felt unnecessary. Or, at the very least, that’s what I told myself at the time.

And then one day, on the highway…

… we look over (or rather, behind) and she’s completely out of her car seat. Wiggled out and basically romping around the backseat. That was moderately (extremely?) terrifying. We needed a solution.

And said solution was…

… we zip tied large buttons right under the chest clip so she couldn’t slide it down and wiggle out. Yep. We used zip ties on our daughter. But you know what? It worked, and it provided some real peace of mind.

What else have you seen/dealt with on car seat drama?

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