BUCKLE UP FOR INSANITY!

When you really think about it, who rides in the back seats of cars? I'll tell you who, children who are being driven by their parents, and teenagers who have too many other teenagers in the car with them to fit in the front seat. That's who rides in back seats. Of course grandma rides back there occasionally, but it's generally small children and teenagers. Knowing this, why wouldn't the car company's design the safety restraints to accommodate small children? Adults never ride back there, teenagers are too cool to care about seat belts, and grandma,. . . well she ain't gonna be around forever anyhow. But no, it requires several pounds of machinery and a PHD to safely restrain a child in the back seat.

Carseats are like a Rubik's cube for a young father. They are not in the slightest bit self-explanatory, and usually this is not apparent until the mother has already driven off with her friends to the "Pampered Chef" party while the young father is left standing with a child in one arm, and the carseat with it's seventeen buckles and straps in the other. This is where the fun begins.

My maiden voyage with the carseat, after being left holding it in one hand and Hannah in the other, had me scratching my head and swearing for no less than an hour. The first challenge being, getting the carseat secured in the car. I had no idea which way the stupid thing was supposed to be facing. Should the child be facing the front of the car or the back? Maybe they should be strapped in like an astronaut, looking at the roof of the car.

I tried to imagine different accident scenario's in hopes that I could then figure out the safest position for the seat. But there are too many different possibilities. A head on collision, a car hitting us from the side, a garbage truck hitting us from behind, a car hitting us from one side and a garbage truck hitting us from the other at the same time, a jetliner crash landing on top of the car, one of those giant worms from TREMORS bashing us from underneath. This line of reasoning was getting me nowhere and soon had me wondering if it wouldn't be easier to just place the child and seat together in the trunk.

I finally decided to strap the seat in facing forward, so I could at least see what the child was up to, and moved on to the more challenging next problem; strapping the child in the seat. For this process, I had straps, buckles, clasps, and something that looked like a noose coming from every corner of the seat. And again, it was not self explanatory as to how each binding should be attached to the child.

Growing impatient, the thought crossed my mind that it might be easiest to unstrap the seat, set the child down and then place the seat on top of the child with a bag of groceries placed in the seat as weight to keep it in place. At least this way, when the accident happened, and the child went hurling towards the windshield, the bag of groceries and the carseat should create a large enough hole in the glass to let the child pass through without getting scratched on the jagged edges. But surely, there would be some bleeding heart yelling accusations at me as I walked up the road to find my safely ejected child. Therefore, I decided against that method.

Feeling like I was running out of options, I decided that the best thing to do was to jump in feet first, and just start binding the child down like a pile of logs on my work truck. Within a few minutes, I had bound each arm and leg independently by buckling and tying it down with whatever lashing happened to be nearest the appendage, but there still remained three straps that had no home. I was able to use one as a chin strap. I then added a second binding to her left leg because my knot on the first strap looked suspect, and with the third and final strap, I did the old once around the whole seat and child for good measure. I guess it wasn't so hard once I had just gotten down to it.

Mastering the child seat is only a temporary fix to the problem of restraining children in vehicles, because it isn't long before they outgrow them. This is when a whole new set of challenges arise. The largest of which is the placement of the stupid shoulder strap, which inevitably ends up across the face of the child. At first, I would make the child keep the shoulder strap in place (I enjoyed the fact that it muffled their high pitched little voices), but again, this caused problems. Apparently their developing brains prevent them from realizing that they should not blow bubbles with their gum while the shoulder strap is blocking the area needed for bubble blowing. It takes at least a half an hour and a pair of scissors to undue the knots of gum, hair and seat belt. That fact, coupled with the whining soon made me realize that leaving the strap across the child's face wasn't going to work.

Thinking I had the perfect solution, I tried taking the shoulder strap and give it a good wrap around their neck, leaving it positioned perfectly out of the way of the child's face. However, my wife, rolling her eyes, told me that this idea "wasn't too bright", so I ended up safety pinning the strap to their shirts, and out of the way.

The hassle and stress that seat belts have caused me, has without a doubt, taken time off the end of my life, and it won't take many more "DADDY'S NOT WEARING HIS SEATBELT"'s, before I consider shortening the life of my children. It makes you start to wonder if the mangulation of a wreck isn't worth not having the seat belt insanity. I suppose not, but it's a close call.