Gearing Up for Baby: Nesting for Men
The Car Seat
We start with car seat because you will need one to get home from the hospital. There are three types:
• Infant: The type your kid will use for about one year or until outgrowing the weight and height limits for the seat.
• Child: Once your child outgrows the infant seat, you can use this until the kid is about 40 pounds, depending on the manufacturer’s specifications.
• Booster: The type you use until your kid is ready to use a regular seatbelt. (Dude, that’s eons away.) For those of you keeping track, you are about to enter the infant phase. Here are the basic things you should look for:
1. Comfort features.
Many reviews leave out this fact, but your kid will be sitting (actually lying) in this piece of plastic for many hours to come, and a comfortable kid is one who might not cry. Comfort is achieved through padding as well as designs that isolate the straps that ride beneath the padding. Pop up the hood-actually lift off the upholstery-and see what kind of padding is underneath. Don’t worry about tearing up the upholstery, since these pieces of fabric are made to come out and be washable. And from poop leaks to spit-up, you will be washing them.
2. Base unit.
Most infant car seats come with a base unit that stays in the car. The actual seat, which is really a kind of bed, then attaches to and detaches from the base unit. This is not a gimmick to get you to buy more gear. Infants are often lulled to sleep by riding in a car, so you will want to be able to extract the baby from the car without unbuckling her and waking her up once you get to your destination. Also, the portability of the car seat allows you to take the baby wherever you go even if she is not asleep. (Hint: Go to as many restaurants as you can until she starts crawling.) Having an extra base unit for your second car is super helpful and is worth the additional expense. Some strollers are designed to fit a car seat as well.
3. Head restraint.
Your kid’s head and neck will be about as stable as a wet noodle for a while. That’s why you are taught to always support a newborn baby’s head when holding it. Many car seats come with a head support that keeps your child’s noggin from moving around too much.
4. Sunshade.
A good sunshade can also help your child sleep. But not all sunshades are created equal. A great sunshade can cover the baby from any angle of the sun, folds easily, and is not super bulky when retracted. Try before you buy.
5. Buckles.
You will buckle and unbuckle your kids thousands of times in the next five years. Check out the straps on the car seat to see if they are easy to do and undo-and most important of all, whether the straps are prone to tangle easily. Several manufacturers have developed straps with “memory” so that your optimal tension settings do not require readjusting every time you buckle the little one into the seat.
