Now that our little guy is inching closer and closer to the one year mark (ten months old already), he is quickly outgrowing many things – clothes, some foods, and his car seat.
Since his birth, we’ve carried him around in a Graco car seat carrier, the type that has bases that attach to the car and allow you to just pull up the seat by a handle and snap in and out of place at ease. It really has been a snap for us, especially when he falls asleep, as all we need to do is pull the carrier off the base, he inside, and bring him into the house where he’d often continue to get the much-needed sleep.
But, alas, he has easily grown beyond the carrier and needed what we refer to as ‘the big boy car seat.’ For someone who had to rely on our local police station for help with the original carrier/car seats, I was quite proud of myself in handling the new installations all on my own. We’re still in rear-facing mode, but they were in, they were sturdy, and they were secure.
They weren’t without their own adjustments, though.
The most notable, of course, is that now our little guy gets carried out of the house and into the car and vice-versa, versus the carriers that allowed us to put him in the seat and carry him to the car and snap into place. At his current size of 20+ pounds, however, that was just becoming an exercise in weight training that was unnecessary.
The downside to this is that if he falls asleep, there’s no more bringing him seamlessly inside to continue his slumber. Instead, when that buckle clicks to unlock, he is awake, whether he likes it or not and immediately wants out of that seat and into whatever is going on around him.
It takes some getting used to. For example, I recently picked him up at Grandma’s house after what was a day of a very short nap, teething, and crankiness. A terrible combination and one that left him very unhappy for the first half of our ride home. With some Tchaikovsky on the radio, he slowly was lulled to sleep halfway through our journey, leaving me with quite the dilemma as I pulled into our driveway.
Here, Mr. Crankypants was in desperate need of a nap, but here we were now home, just shortly after he fell asleep. What to do, what to do. I texted my wife, just feet away, inside of the house, my dilemma.
And I decided to wait.
So, there we were. Me sitting in the parked car in the driveway, killing time on my phone, listening to Symphony Hall on Satellite Radio as my son snored away in the background.
After a little while and realizing what was going on, my wife appeared at my car window and said I probably shouldn’t spend the entire evening sitting in the car in the driveway, and helped me slowly get him out of the car in the least intrusive way possible. He awoke, yes, but with his mommy just within arm’s reach, he was much happier with being awakened had it just been his dorky daddy.
The Dorky Daddy 