Safety Seat Shuffle

Isaac has four months to go before he turns 2, which is the age recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics for turning toddlers from rear-facing to .

The problem is, Ike is pretty big for his age. Standing next to his 4-year-old big sister, who also seems tall for her age (I make ‘em big, apparently), he already reaches her shoulder. In his rear-facing car seat in the back of my not-so-roomy PT Cruiser, his knees are starting to jam up into his torso; his legs are so long now that his feet hit the back of the backseat and therefore his body is starting to squonch up.

Take a gander over at the seat behind my driver’s seat, and you’ll see Lucy in her high-backed, Consumer Reports-approved booster seat. Her legs are now so long that her feet are jammed into the back of my seat, her Ugg-booted toes are noodged into my lower back, which routinely gets kicked if traffic stacks up on on the drive home from school at night.

With all these little toes in uncomfortable places, the time has come for a little safety seat shuffle. We may brake the rules and turn Ike around now so he can face forward. Even though he’s technically younger than the designated age, at this point the boy is technically the size of many 3-year-olds. So my tentative plan is to turn him around and move his seat behind my seat, where his legs are still shorter than his sister’s. Then Lucy can ride in the backseat on the passenger side, where I can move the front seat up as far as it can go, and then she won’t be so cramped.

If everybody wins by the proposed seat-swap, why am I still fretting about going ahead and doing it? I guess I’m tentative because I’ve always been a rule-follower, and even though we also turned Lucy’s seat to front-facing slightly ahead of the curve – and back then the rules said that age 1 was fine for forward-facing – I want to do what’s ideal and recommended by people who are smarter than me when it comes to keeping my children safe.

, what do you think about the myriad of new and ever-changing safety standards? Do you follow them to the letter or do you rely more on your own common sense to make these decisions? Tell us in the comments.