We finally bought the bigger size car seat for Madeline. She was starting to look like her head was going to pop out beyond the top of the seat. Since we were at Target anyways looking for the ever elusive pool and patio furniture we figured it would be worth picking-up the car seat. Target didn’t actually have suitable pool furniture because they don’t include their pool stuff at every store. But we did hang out putting Madeline into various car seats to register comfort vs. safety vs. cost vs. fashion. A couple who were proud grandparents were also searching for the larger size car seat as well so they asked Sarah her opinions as any real modern mother must be a fountain of knowledge from Internet and library research. We told them that the most expensive one was probably the safest and best but the least expensive one would probably do fine too. I was very tempted to purchase the super low budget car seat. It looked a little less comfortable but the asbestos hanging out of the sides was hardly noticeable and the razor sharp metal pillow also seemed to be fine as long as you installed the baby properly per the guidelines in the manual. So we bought the Britax Marathon, a top of the line item at Target, because it was listed as $20 cheaper than the prices that Sarah had seen online. They didn’t have it handy in the color Sarah wanted “Cow-Moo-Flage” so I was spared the agony of cow pattern ridicule for now.

Upon returning home we decided to see how we could get a second car seat for the second car as I am sure these things will be multiplying like rabbits throughout our home. I looked on eBay, Craigslist, the usual hiding places for other people’s garbage but the folks on craigslist have been hoarding these cow pattern baby saving devices and eBay is filled with vendors rather than hard-up Midwestern families looking to feed their third child by selling their first child’s 20 lb plus car seat. So we may still need to pay near full price for the next car seat. I did see some seats that looked mildly old but my guess is that the infant mortality rate from 2002 was about 10X what it is today given the differences between the modern 2006 car seat with pleather styling, side head whiplash protection, and special car compatible clips instead of seatbelt installation. The older models of car seats did look like they were something out of the early stone age and although they might be as safe they certainly would be a higher likelihood that DSS would be called in to investigate the mistreatment of our little angel were we to place her in one of these wooden death traps from the last century. So we are in the market for a bunch of these bigger car seats that we will probably only need for a few months anyways since there is another booster seat phase that has been devised by the car seat lobbyists to insure profits for these manufacturers for years to come. If they had their way in the car seat world they would have special seats for 30 year olds, 40 year olds, people with odd shaped heads, big nosed people, whatever such that we could only preserve our fragile elderly relatives (people over 25) with the proper head gear and pleather side whiplash system styled by Eddie Bauer working in collaboration with the Swiss Army and the Swatch corporation.