Tag: car seats

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood

Forget Waterboarding, Try Childboarding

carseatdanget Never having experienced true torture beyond that which my older brother subjected me to growing up, I can only judge torture by its outcome. In the immortal words of Star Trek’s Spock, I believe that,

“…the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the
few or the one.”

With the exception of maybe paying taxes, I agree with Spock and as such, I’m all for torturing known criminals when the ultimate goal is saving lives. Recently, Waterboarding, an arguable form of torture involving holding a person’s head backwards while pouring water into their breathing passages, has become something of a debate. Some say it IS torture while others say it is not.

I say, “Forget Waterboarding!” I have a much more effective form of torture that is sure to bring a callous, grown man to tears within an hour. Here’s how it works.

Take a small-to-medium-sized pickup truck and clean everything out of the back cab area. Then, take two Graco or Cosco (or really any brand will do) car seats and force the person to install them in the back behind the front seats. Make him or her put them in and tighten them down, then remove them again and start all over. Force them to do this over and over again ’till they break. If you can do it in a hot garage, even better!

It’s that simple, and if you don’t believe that it’ll work, I invite you to come over to my house and try it out.

I know this is torture because I had to do it last night and I have the scraped knuckles and peeled back fingernails to prove it. I just don’t understand why they have to be so friggin’ difficult. I mean, I’m a small man, with fairly small hands and I can just barely get mine in that tiny little tunnel in the back of the carseat where you’re supposed to thread the shoulder belt through. And forget using the latch thingies in the back of a pickup truck because once you get two of these gargantuan seats in there, there’s no room for your hands to go digging down behind the seat in search of the buckle.

Ohmylord! I spent nearly thirty minutes struggling and swearing reasoning with our seats last night before finally coming to the conclusion that you could only do one of the following:

  1. Put one car seat in the back of cab behind the passenger’s seat and another in the front passenger’s seat
  2. Go purchase a “booster seat only” for our four-year old and put that either in the front seat or in the rear behind the driver
  3. Say “screw it” and work from home on Monday so CareerMom could take my truck to the airport, while I took the boys in to daycare. This way, I get to keep the car all week while she’s in San Francisco. (While overall the most attractive option, I hated to do this because I’m already going to work from home most of the week and figure I should at least go in on Monday)

When I bought my truck, a Dodge Dakota with a club cab (not the cab with extra doors), I did so because it was the only medium-sized truck that let you put car seats in the back without having to spend the extra $3K on the quad cab. And at the time, I was only thinking about one car seat, not two. I didn’t consider that when one child was older, and we had another one to contend with, the older child would need not only room for the carseat, but also room for his legs.

Silly me!

Anyway, we chose option # 2 and got a booster-seat-only thing and put it behind the driver’s side. It’ll still be cramped, but at least he won’t be in the front seat (although that would be kinda cool for him!)

Childboarding may not be true torture by some folks’ reckoning, but you put a clean, calm, grown man in that situation and he’ll come out a different person altogether. And maybe he’ll be ready to talk too. I sure was. Of course, what I was saying wasn’t exactly fit for a child’s ears.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Marriage

To Grandmother’s House We Go…

For the first time in about 8 years, my mom’s side of the family (well, one of my mom’s) decided to all get together this year. And they are doing it in a four-bedroom cabin in Tennessee. This cabin is just over the river and literally through the woods from my mom’s house in Walland, TN and the cabin is located just this side of Gatlinburg, TN. So, from my mom’s house to the cabin, it’s about a 40-minute drive.

Originally, CareerMom and I decided we’d go up there, stay at my mom’s house at night to give the boys better sleeping arrangements, and then drive over to the cabin each day and spend time with family. However, as the time has drawn nearer, this has seemed less and less like a great idea.  For one, my youngest slept almost straight through the night for four nights in a row. This is unprecedented thus far and it is believed by many that dragging him up to Tennessee, where he’d have to sleep in a hard pack-n-play, would ruin whatever miracle schedule we’ve stumbled on. (Author’s Note: Since that four-night sleeping stretch, he’s had two nights of waking up twice, and then four times another night). Also, the car trip. If you’ll harken back with me to the Beach Trip of 2007, none of us were looking forward to spending 4 ½ hours up and down in the car, plus 45 minutes of gut-twisting back and forth turns through the woods to get to the cabin.

So as CareerMom and I lay by the fire the other night, we both confessed how little we were actually looking forward to this trip. Out of that came a plan: I would take our oldest son and go, while CareerMom stayed behind with the baby. There was really no way I could get out of going altogether given that the family made an effort to gather, but we both felt that taking the baby would only be a burden on everyone’s efforts at having fun considering the problems we have getting him to sleep in strange places. (Author’s Note: We took our oldest son down to the beach when he was four months old and despite constant admonishing while he was napping, people continued to yell and bang around and so he did not sleep and was miserable. Same bunch of people, same situation here).

I called my mom to break the bad news and she was, as expected, disappointed. But as I dug deeper into her disappointment, it became clear to me that really all she wanted to do was show off the baby. It was pretty clear that the rest of us coming was secondary. See, she has this little competition with her youngest sister whose daughter has two children. It’s all about whose kid is the cutest see and she’s built up my youngest son to epic proportions of cuteness and now, she’ll have no proof.  She also didn’t seem to buy my excuses, which are very valid and since she’s never raised a child, not something she can relate to.

At one point, she compared my youngest’s traveling issues with her sister’s daughter’s children and pointed out that since they are “in church all the time” (pointing out that we aren’t) her children are used to it. I pointed out, quite annoyed at this point, that having a child around other people in no way compares to traveling with children. Our kids are in daycare all day. They get along with people fine; they just HATE car seats, and they don’t sleep well in strange places.

If you’re in your fifties, and you raised children, you did so in the era of vans, during a time of built-in beds and tables and no car seats. Traveling then was a breeze compared to now. Now, the poor kid has to remain tightly strapped into a nonmovable, hard plastic car seat, with sides that come around like blinders giving the child little to look at for hours on end. It was a different time and traveling today is just so vastly different from thirty years ago.

Suffice it to say that I hung up the phone with absolutely no desire to go up there whatsoever. And what really steams me is that this will be the third time I/we’ve gone up there since spring and they haven’t come here once. But they have the nerve to question my complaints about travel.

It’s the holidays folks. How about we just be happy to get to see each other huh?