I just realized this morning as I looked around my garage and counted one fancy car seat and two car booster seats that I don’t need them any more. My little one, K-, turned 8 last week (I even hosted a party for her pals at the local bowling alley. Solo. Yikes!) and the Colorado law for children needing to be in a booster seat states that “under 8” is the criterion.
So we’re done. I can get rid of these car seats (which turns out to be a surprisingly tricky thing because technically it’s illegal to resell them, as detailed in a much earlier blog post I wrote here about why you can’t buy or sell used carseats).
Eight is old for requiring carseats, actually: a lot of states have six as the cutoff age and some also add a weight requirement so that those increasingly rare underweight children, the little waifs, might have to be in a carseat even longer.
But no, according to Colorado law, the cutoff age for car seat use changed from six to eight on 1 August, 2011.
When you read about these laws, though, it’s hard to understand why even eight year olds should be considered safe without car seats: younger children who use booster seats are apparently 45% less likely to be injured in a crash than those using adult seat belts.
Ah, as I read more I can see that the safety experts actually recommend booster seats based on height, not weight, and that the boosters are recommended until the little folk are 4’9″ or taller.
Which makes me want to measure K- and see how tall she is. Then again, she’s very excited that she can just sit on the regular car seat like her bigger siblings so if I said that there was a height requirement for her being done, I suspect there’d be rebellion in the ranks. 🙂
And the whole thing about this being yet another milestone and my littlest one moving along in age? Yeah, I’m going to avoid thinking about that one. Time is a beautiful thing, even when it inexorably pulls them away from being those cute-as-a-button little ones.
Now if I can only figure out what to do with these extra car seats…