baby car seat for van guide
hey guys we wanted to take the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about car seats obviously for any parent that's always going to be a priority no matter what it is that you're driving
kids which is fantastic you can recline it but where does it live when you want to use the van you know the kids don't want to sit in their car seat all the time plus it completely inhibits the use of you as an adult to be able to use the bench seat which is where you know for your meals and you know just sitting around gathering as a family you just can't do that when this is in the way so you know for us um this we quickly learned that this wasn't a long-term option for us for the van and that we'd have to start thinking about uh finding a different solution our kids are seven and nine and so eden particularly qualifies to be in a just a regular booster seat pretty much just like this one the issue that we have with that though is that the evo smart bed system that we have in the van doesn't have headrests inbuilt obviously, if it did you would have to then take those out to be able to put the bed down and put them back in again the next day you can have that retrofitted and it is something that you can do we looked into it and thought about it but you know ultimately decided against it because for us it just felt like another step in terms of putting the van up for camping and taking it down again for traveling and also you know you just it's something else to find somewhere you know to store the head rests overnight it's just another thing to kind of cluster up the space so for us it just wasn't something that we wanted to do which ultimately led us to the decision that what we did need was a high back booster but just not one as cumbersome as the britax that we originally had so coincidentally my mum had some seats that she used in her car for the girls and it turned out to be just what we were looking for so this is just a mother care option what's good about this is that although it's still a high back booster which is what we need it's much lighter than the britax the britax is kind of like a plastic um and it's quite cumbersome uh and bulky this uh is more streamlined it's a slimmer build so it fits much better on the seats in terms of the girls having access to actually get to you know even to plug in their seat belts it's a much much roomier option nd it's just lighter to be able to move around which makes again putting it away and stirring it away which I'll show you what we do that in just a second just makes it just a lot more a smoother process a lot easier um again it gives them the security they need they've got that high back they've got that headrest we know that they're safe so yeah it just felt like the right compromise so you guys can see exactly
what I was talking about before and there are no headrests up here um so yeah that's obviously a problem and clearly, we need the highback boosters for the kids it just wouldn't be safe without them and you can see the mechanism is right here the hinges are right here for when the bed is pulled down the one thing that we did find handy for the kids um was to have these seat belt extension clips here and we got them off amazon they're crash tested the kids just didn't like having to fumble way back here to plug themselves in when they got into the van so we just found that having these extension uh just really help with that it just means that you know they can do that easily themselves without 
us having to kind of help them every time they get in the van so where do we store them when we are camping well I think um you know when we were thinking about what to do about car seats and the need that we had for the girls to be safe but also the available space that we had in the van um you know we really kind of thought it through and it made sense that area of the van that you're just not going to be using at all when you're camping is the driver's seat so for us, it just made sense that that area of the van that space should be the space to store the car seats um I know that some people might you opt to kind of have some tarp wrapped over the car seats and they might pop it outside for the night I think that's great if you're in you know kind of sunnier climbs but for us, in the UK we get you to know pretty windy weather and I just wouldn't trust that they would be there when we wake up in the morning so I just knew that we had to have somewhere in the van that was weather tight that we could you know to make sure that it was definitely going to be there we woke up in the morning and they weren't going to be wet and damp all that stuff so the driver's seat seemed like the best place and so yeah let me just show you how we do that first thing I'm going to do is to just pop this seat back down it's not essential but it makes it a bit easier and it comes down really easy anyway so why not so I'm just going to push the button and then that ower forward like that and then I'm literally just gonna lift one seat into there easy as pie and then I literally just put the second seatupside down like that 
and what's great this is that when you're sleeping you kind of end up some extra sort of storage space so you sort of have like a little shelf here that's kind of formed by the bottom of the seat so we just use that for things like hoodies for example you know if you just want to have one easy to grab in the morning when you get up and just kind of roll them up and fold them up and stick them on there and it kind of just you know gives you a little bit of extra shelfing for the night and again just in here we've kind of got this little sort of well that's kind of created in between the seats we can just use that for shoving in some bags or some you know hoodies extra blankets that kind of stuff so it just kind of keeps it all together um it's pretty primitive I will say but it works really well um and otherwise it's just dead space you're not going to be using it you're sleeping you're camping uh you know it's what else you're going to use it overnight so it seemed to make the most sense so the other thing that is a consideration with this as well is security for the van um I mean my goodness heaven forbid the worst should ever happen um and somebody tries to you know break into the van, at night if they're if they're approaching from the driver's side door um you know I kind of think this is to our benefits so we use um you know thermal window coverings when we camp at night so nobody looking into the van would know these were here so you know it's not gonna it's not gonna save the day but it's certainly gonna slow someone down if they open the door and they don't know these are here and then suddenly they're greeted with two big car seats on the way you know it's going to take them a little longer to kind of get on with the business of trying to steal your van or whatever so yeah just an added benefit I guess an extra bit of peace of mind um and generally, it's a good solution and it works well so hopefully that's been useful um hopefully it has helped you guys in thinking about what kind of car seats you might use for your van and your kids um but more hints and tips on traveling in a van
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