Thursday, June 3, 2010

Have you had this experience?

I think every parent has probably had this experience, washing the car seat. What a joke! First of all good car seats cost a fortune, this particular model Britax cost nearly 300 dollars. For that price they ought to wash themselves right? They should at least be machine washable. Maybe some models are but ours says "spot wash".

Explain to me how you should spot wash when your kid vomits or pees on the thing? I actually cannot believe that I have not tried to wash it before because I am a bit of a fanatic about things being clean and vacuum out the car regularly.
So what happened was Sydney had an accident at school right as I arrived to pick her up (which is a whole different story) and had no clean pants to change into so I had her sit on a plastic bag on the way home and her seat still got wet.


So I called my good friend who has 2 Britax seats and asked her how she has washed hers. She unfortunately has had a few vomiting car experiences so she has put hers in the wash machine and the dryer. So that is just what I did, gentle cycle and then low heat. If you have had to take a car seat apart before you know what a pain it is.

The holes are so small and you really have to push and tug to get the straps through the hole.




The of course putting it back together is a real fun task. And to make matters worse you only have a few hours to do it because your child needs a car seat in the am.





Lots of slots and lots of straps and lots of SWEAT on my part!






Finally back together and then putting it back in the car. Our car has the metal hooks in the seat so it is super secure but it can be a challenge to find the hook and again more SWEAT. I was putting the seat back in the car in the dark because it was late at night by the time the seat cover was washed, dried and put back together.




All ready for the passenger.


If I had only known that Sydney would wake up vomiting in the middle of the night and would not be going to school the next day anyway I would not have been in such a time crunch.







2 comments:

  1. Oh Meghan... I have been there. I am kinda crazy about keeping things clean too. The stroller and the carseats are so hard to get apart, but they are so nice to have clean again. The biggest struggle is finding the time to do it, because it is such a process. I just cleaned out the car yesterday and was looking at Lillian's car seat and thinking I need to take it apart and wash it! Oh the things we do....

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  2. We have had the vomit in the car seat thing and it is such a pain! The boys both have the same model seat, only Patrick's is a couple years newer and it is WAY easier to deal with than Henry's. Henry threw up in his on the way to grandma's once, so we had to rip everything out and clean it before we could go home! There was a screwdriver and lots of sweat involved!

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