La di da

eldar has headed off to Wembley for the NFL game. He refused to admit he's really excited about it, but I bet he is.

Aliza's decided to have a nap and I've just had a burst of efficiency--cleaned up the kitchen, did the bottles, and sorted out the piles of crap next to the bed. I put a huge batch of diapers in to wash earlier, so I'm waiting on those. In a minute I'll go sew buttons back onto various pieces of clothing while watching Ugly Betty. The excitement! It's wet and icky, so I really don't feel like going out and doing anything.

Ooh awake baby... she'll want attention now.

Car seat conundrum

Aliza has almost outgrown her infant carrier (group 0+). it's up to 13kg, but she's nearly too tall for it.

Therefore, I have a problem, and a bit of a cultural issue.

In the US, it's illegal for a child under 1 year or 20 lbs to ride front-facing, and there's an increasing emphasis on keeping kids rear-facing for longer. The most common US carseats now seem to be convertibles--you RF to 33 lbs, then turn to FF.

It seems that in the UK, babies go straight from bucket to front-facing. It's not illegal, and it's common. There aren't many convertible seats, and they only seem to go up to 13kg RF anyway--so it's not like she'd get much more time out of it, if any. I've also been told that the convertibles don't get the best safety ratings here either.

So I'm going to have to put her front facing--but I don't want to because I don't feel it's really safe. I feel like the US is ahead on car seat safety (they also adopted booster seats before the UK) (BTW this really surprised me, I always felt like Europe was ahead on things like this and the US was slower to adopt new safety standards because of cost) and I've seen enough evidence about the importance of RF'ing for older babies. There's actually impact videos showing the difference in an accident.

I am not a happy bunny now.