It had been coming for a while, but we finally did it. Baby G is no longer in a bucket seat. Poor thing was pretty uncomfortable in there. His feet were hanging way over the edge, which meant that more than once we’d stubbed his toe against a car, door or wall as we were trying to carry him in the seat. His head was nearing the top, and he could easily grab the handle with both of his hands. I’d be driving and look back and he’d be holding on to each side like it was a roller coaster and he was afraid to let go.
I’m probably lucky he hasn’t been screaming non stop in the car, though. He would protest every time I put him in the seat, and then eventually accept his fate and cheer up a bit. I’m sure that has everything to do with being in the backseat with his brother (who just happens to entertain him constantly), but I’ll take what I can get. The other day G was playing with his voice and making weird noises, so I started to mimic them. We ended up with this funny game back and forth where one of use would make a noise and the other would do the same thing. I started laughing, and G laughed back. His laugh is.. unique. I laughed back at him with a loud, fake laugh. He did the same thing. It was cracking me up and went on for quite a while, while E tried to figure out what we were doing.
E likes to keep tabs on his baby brother in the backseat. He lets me know if he’s dropped his pacifier or if he’s chewing on something. He’s also enjoying that they have matching seats now. Every day he’ll laugh and tell me that E has purple and G has green. It’s pretty cute.
So anyway, I’d been promising baby G a new seat for a while, so when a car seat trade in event popped up, we knew it was time. In theory it would be easy – we’d take his old seat to the store, trade it in and get our coupon, and then go buy a new seat that we could install that day. We actually already had one of the seats that we needed, we just needed a second for Tom’s car. I figured we’d do it on the weekend, and it would all go smoothly.
Of course if it had, I wouldn’t be writing about it. Tom’s car is smaller than mine (something we probably have to fix at some point) and so the options for car seats in his backseat that still give him enough legroom to drive the car, are limited. Which meant that we needed to buy a specific seat. That was not sold in stores, and took 3-4 days to ship to us. We tried a few different ideas, thinking about swapping car seats back and forth or me doing both drop off and pick up every day while we waited for the seat to get to us, but all of them were bad. It seemed like more trouble than it was worth to save 20%.
I was mentioning this to my neighbor, when she laughed and said, oh hold on. She went over to her garage and came back with an expired car seat for us. “Here, trade in this one!” Oh, right. The neighbors with twins who just outgrew a bunch of car seats that they have sitting in their garage. It worked perfectly, by the way. We traded in their old car seat, ordered our new one and kept G in the bucket seat until the new one arrived.
Of course as soon as something becomes easier (no more super heavy bucket seat to carry!) there’s always a new challenge. Such as needing to carry the baby or bring the stroller everywhere, since he can’t walk yet, and I still have another child to keep track of at the same time. He’ll probably be walking ridiculously soon, though, and we’ll be on to new problems. There’s a foam mat tower in his room at daycare, that he’s never been able to get up on. Why would he? He can’t crawl, and can only pull himself around the room. Well somehow he figured out how to pull himself right up the structure in the past few days. He’s a quick little bugger too. When I walked into the room the other day a teacher with a baby already in her arms was leaning over G on the tower and trying to keep him from the edge. She looked up at me and said “Oh thank god!” Apparently it was a full time job trying to keep G from throwing himself off head first, and she had a few hungry babies looking to be fed.
Those other babies, by the way? All girls. It’s a weird twist of genetics that has left G as the only boy in his class. It’s not really noticeable at this age, unless you’re looking at the names, but I wonder if it will continue as he gets older. The names are an interesting grouping too. They range from maybe the worst name I can think of for a girl right now, to the name we’re secretly holding for a hypothetical girl that may never exist, and we hadn’t heard anywhere else until it popped up in G’s class, of all places. As opposed to E’s class which has all the popular name in the top 10 lately, G’s class is filled with names like Odette.
Either way, G seems to like the kids in his class. We often get reports that he’ll sit watching the other kids do something, and start cracking up. Funny when they’re playing or eating, less helpful when it’s naptime and he’s keeping them all awake with his laughter.
