Tag: baby equipment

In car seat news, I see Britax has the Premium SICT ISOFIX Compatible out, with rear-facing until the child is 2 or 3. Sadly, it also has a rear-facing depth of 600mm, more than 8cm greater than our current rear-facing seat. I’d need to rest my feet on the dash to ride in front of a seat that big, and I think it would even be impossible for Andrew. Extended rear-facing advocates (well, some of them) have been telling me for ages that extended rear-facing seats take up, if anything, less room in the car than normal rear-facing infant seats, because the seat doesn’t have to recline as much. If this is any guide… not so much.

Perhaps this will be true when cheaper extended rear-facing seats start to come out (apparently being a tall adult is not a “premium” parenting feature… except when you’re buying prams and strollers, when it totally is). I think it’s likely A will be pushing age 2 by that point anyway, so with any luck, this is the end of my very short career as a car seat blogger!

Disclosures: you can rest assured no one is offering me their giant car seats in return for a review!

I hadn’t noticed, writing my car seat review (most of which I drafted about a month ago), that as of just a few days ago, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission have signed off on the 2013 updates to the Australian Safety Standards allowing ISOFIX (with top tether) baby car seats to be sold and used in Australia. Car Advice has an article about it. Maxi-Cosi has seats for sale already. Britax (the Safe-n-Sound company) will apparently follow this month.

The new standards should also allow more extended rear-facing, which is good news for children’s safety in cars. That said, I am not sure if we personally will get A an extended rear-facing or ISOFIX seat for practical reasons: we car-share, and I don’t know the ISOFIX status of all the models of car we drive, and then of course there’s also the seat depth issue: if they have a longer seat depth (the two Maxi-Cosi seats so far are both 57cm), A is safer at the expense of me getting airbag injuries (and/or losing steering wheel play because my knees are touching it). Tricky!

But average sized people and/or people who own their own cars may be interested to hear that you can now get one brand of ISOFIX seat in Australia with more to come!

This is a rare product review interlude for me to extol the virtues of the Safe-n-Sound Compaq car seat for the Australian market, perhaps useful to other tall people I know.

We have giant giant children and I’m a giant giant person married to a merely tall person. This makes rear-facing car seats really difficult, because they take up loads of room, and you’re not supposed to push your seat back into them (some instructions don’t even want the front seat touching a rear-facing seat). But at the same time, it is neither comfortable nor safe to travel with your knees smooshed into the dashboard, or (as I would have to, in front of some rear facing seats) with your feet resting up on the dashboard: an airbag deployment will break your legs.

Most of the solutions I’ve seen to this are either calculated using hypotheticals I don’t favour (wouldn’t you shatter your femur on request to prevent injury to your child? no? what kind of mother are you?), involve one parent being fairly short (“rear-facing car seats are such a good excuse to make DH drive for a year while I sit in front of the seat, LOL ;)”) or don’t work (you can centre-install the seat… which then inhibits both front seats from pushing back, because infant seats are wide. Uh).

Anyway, after complaining about this issue a lot when V was young, I did a touch more research this time around, and discovered that the feature we were looking for in seats was called “rear-facing install depth”, and therefore the search term is something like “Australia car seat rear facing shortest install depth” and the answer is the Safe-n-Sound Compaq at 52.5cm depth (one of the InfaSecure Kompressors was just slightly deeper, when I searched). This is about 7cm more precious leg room than the Babylove Prelude we had V in.  That is quite a lot of room! To be fair, I actually still can’t really sit in front of it (“rear-facing car seats are such a good excuse to make DW drive for a year while I sit in front of the seat, LOL ;)”) but Andrew can and perhaps I could in a suitably large car.

That’s really the main point of the review, I buy car seats on one axis. But it has a couple of other features I like: first, it comes in colours other than grey and black (although you can get it in grey or black if you like). We got the 2012 model in “apple green”; the current model, the Compaq AHR, comes in Cool Berry and in Blue. Second, as the baby gets taller, you can change the height of the shoulder straps by sliding the back up and down rather than re-threading the straps through higher holes. This was only ever slightly annoying in the Prelude, but I do think it’s an improvement. Finally, and importantly, it seems to allow the child themselves to be quite tall while still rear-facing. A is nearly 9 months now, and on about the 95th percentile for length, and it looks like she’ll be rear-facing until close to her birthday. This is longer than we were able to keep V rear-facing (although back then, rear-facing was by weight, not length).

Disclosures: this review was not solicted and I was not compensated for it in any way.