Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Safety Dance

Weeks before Ruby was born, we had two safety car seats for her. Luckily for us, both were generous gifts! (I didn't know that until I read Ani's comment below... Thanks to the Douglass family and the wonderful ladies at Zaiga's work!) Infant seats are great because they double as carriers, and they latch onto grocery carts, the back of the chairs at the sushi restaurant, and they have curved bottoms which function as rockers to calm fussy squawkers. We used one for sand free trips around town, and the other for our weekly beach excursions.

Learning to properly install the base was a time consuming and somewhat scary process. Each car had different challenges. My truck was cramped; the seat in Ani’s truck often needed to be installed and uninstalled, and our new car had a strange latch system. When we finally got these vehicles and my mom’s car figured out, driving finally felt safe, and all was right with the world. Unfortunately, two weeks later Ruby had outgrown these safety devices.

Before Ruby was here, five months seemed like an eternity. The couple of months leading up to her birth were agonizingly long. When we got the seats that were supposed to last for six months, I didn’t think anything about it. I thought, “Sure, I’ll be ready to look for something new six months from now. No problem.” But now I’m thinking hard about it, and I’m wondering how anything can be designed to last for four to six months! My mom used to put me in a basket on the floor of the car in front of the passenger seat. I remember riding on the hump behind the gearshift in my grandfather’s truck. We didn’t have seats that cost hundreds of dollars and lasted for four months. I think yogurt lasts for almost that long!

Of course, we want Ruby to be as safe as possible, so we went and bought a new toddler seat. Ani researched them and decided on the safest and longest lasting one she could find. It cost $250 dollars, but obviously Ruby is worth it. Sadly, it didn’t fit in my truck. So we went and bought a smaller one for $200 dollars. Since it doesn’t have an interchangeable base system like the infant seats, we kept the one for Ani's car, the one for my truck, and my mom will have to get one too. That’s a lot of car seats for one baby! It’s a lot harder to deal with the new one, because we can't just lift the handle and pop it out of the stationary base, baby and all. We have to unbuckle Ruby, and then carry her squirmy baby body in some other manner. This can make for challenging trips out into the world. Yesterday, I had my first guitar lesson with Tim, and I came very close to bashing my new guitar against my truck in true Rock and Roll fashion; I was so frustrated by the new baby seat process. As Tim’s girlfriend Nicole pointed out, the fact that I was mad about the workings of a child safety restraint in my Toyota would have made it quite a bit less “Rock and Roll” than Pete Townsend’s slamming his Rickenbacker through the drum kit at the end of a four hour concert. Oh well, I rock in my own way.

I’m dumbfounded by the things that I neglected to worry about while I was growing up. Paul and I went to the park to eat lunch the other day, and the playground equipment was made out of rubber coated plastic, and the jungle gym was situated on top of a padded surface, much different than the cement, asphalt, and gravel that I remember. Everywhere I look, some kid is wearing a helmet while he roller-skates or rides his bike. I am really glad that Ruby and her generation will be safer than the children of the past, but I just can’t get over how dorky they look.
Please be safe little one.

P.S.:
I know this post has been a long time coming, but I finished moving the Archives! They are all there! I have also been spending a fair amount of my time printing and compiling them into an old school readable format for my grandmother. She doesn’t have much patience or interest in computers, but she loves her great granddaughter and namesake (Ruby Angiolena), so I’ll drop this off to her house tomorrow.

It’s too bad that she doesn’t like computers, because she is missing out on all of your wonderful comments. I wonder how much of my blog will be unintelligible or uninteresting to her without hypertext.