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Our little girl is growing up and she’s now too big for the internal harnesses of her car seat. I have been meaning for a while to look up how to change this from a child seat into a booster seat, but life gets in the way and every time Phoebe gets in the car we have to struggle to strap her in. But after a trip to the Discovery Centre in Luton (my initial discovery was that most of it was closed - but then we found the proper museum part which does have some quite cool old forms of transport in it) and Phoebe crying as I tried to do up the harness because it was too tight, I got the chair out of the car and took it in, to scour the internet for instructions and youtube videos.
It turns out that I am just as bad at taking things apart as I am at building, but as usual the instruction manual was not great. I spent a good 45 minutes trying to get the crotch strap out of the strap retainer. I could never have imagined in my previous 50 years that anything could happen involving a crotch strap that was not incredibly amusing. But it was very frustrating. C
heck out the instruction manual, page 39, instructions 3 and 4. It seems you have to push the buckle up through the slot and then pull it out at the other side. But the strap bunched up, the buckle got stuck and I wrestled the chair all over the room, trying my best not to crush my baby (and more importantly my laptop). The only youtube video I could find on this subject showed someone who had
seemingly taken their chair apart and was using a hammer to get the buckle through and the comments showed that this was a common problem.
Personally I was ready to kill myself or my children to avoid this issue, or at the very least just cut off all the straps and accept that I was never going to convert this chair back to a baby one (and in all likelihood I won’t, as I think Phoebe will still be using it when Ernie is the right size for it). I handed it over to my wife to see if she could release the trapped buckle, but in the 30 seconds that she was in charge she managed to drop an Allen key into the internal part of the chair. Which wasn’t a help. So I turned to Twitter.
And thankfully someone directed me to another youtube video (by someone who had seen the hammer one) which gave
the actual secret of how to get this buckle out. Which to be fair is a closely guarded secret, really not made clear in the manual. And it still took me a dozen goes to get the fucker through.
Why is everything so hard? It can’t be that I am stupid. Can it?
Amazingly the rest of the process was relatively easy and I now have a booster seat for my giant daughter. Now I just have to work out how to fit it in the car. Or kill my kids. I think I will just kill my kids.
Not really. They’re pretty good value for money. I made waffles for breakfast this morning and offered some maple syrup to my daughter. She was sceptical, but tried to anyway. “Not bad,†she casually commented, “Not bad." The world is no longer full of wonder. She's 2 going on 39.
