Former Industry Leader, what do you have for us??

There's a rumor going around (a well-substantiated rumor) that a certain car seat company, which was a pioneer in extended rear-facing, but has since fallen behind (although still the industry leader in extended harnessing), is doing what everyone's been hounding them to do for years, and releasing a seat this year that has more than their current sorry 35 pound rear-facing weight limit. The rumor is that the new seat will be good for up to 40 pounds rear-facing and 80 pounds forward-facing. OK, that's not bad. They've officially caught up to the better ones among cheap-ass seats in Wal Mart. Sunshine Kids is still leading with their 45 pound RF weight limit, and their seats have the leg room while rear-facing to actually make that feasible (the most leg room of any rear-facing seat available in the US!) Basically, the point is, I won't be trading in our pretty little 2010 Radian XTSL anytime soon. We're all still completely smitten with it.

With that said, I'm still curious to see what the former industry leader in this stuff comes up with. Will they really get on the ball and give the people what they want? We are asking more of our car seats than we were five years ago. We want to rear-face our children well into preschool, and for that, we need the weight limits to allow it. We need short bottom harness slots so people can use these seats from birth, and tall top slots so that they'll fit a tall Kindergartener who's not ready for a booster yet. A lot of people's kids are fat these days, so we need a high weight harness in addition to high height. What's more, this seat can't be huge! We need to fit three across in a compact car, because fewer and fewer of us are willing to upgrade to a gas-guzzling behemoth of an SUV, or a hopelessly lame mini-van, just because we had a few kids. We ask a lot of our car seats, so I'm going to be very interested to see what our former industry leader does with this.

Within the past year, I have not been very impressed with many of their new seats. The only new one is basically an even bulkier version of an already bulky seat, which supposedly protects the passenger next to the seat, too, but does absolutely nothing more for the child IN the seat itself, but they don't really emphasize that fact, and have basically upped the price by $100 (to approximately $360) compared to the old model, which does exactly the same thing for the child in the seat. The only thing they've come out with in the past year that's actually worth it is a harnessed booster that has the tallest top harness slots on the market, and actually works well as a booster once they are outgrown. That was basically just a barely modified version of something they already had, though. They just made the top harness slots an inch taller and upped the price by roughly $75.

(As gimmicky as that may be, we actually might have to buy the latter seat for Orren in a couple years, depending how old he is when he outgrows his Radian. It would be nice if the Radian got him to 5 years old or more, and then we could just get him a Monterey like what Erin has. He's only got two harness slots left before he outgrows his Radian by height. Being that he's only 16 months, that doesn't really seem like we'll make 5, so we'll have to do something, and "something" is probably the Frontier 85 unless Sunshine Kids comes out with a harnessed booster with tall top slots before then.)

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to seeing whether our former, but now rather disappointing, industry leader, will actually jump back into the game with something that gives the people what they want, or if they're going to basically fizzle as far as the extended rear-facing world is concerned, and just become, for all intents, a harnessed booster and common car seat manufacturer. Until then, though, I'll just keep checking their company online sites, and sifting through ten thousand posts from other moms begging to review the new seat for them, and absolutely nothing from the company.

On that subject, I must say I am grateful for the fact that my husband not only makes enough money to buy us the baby stuff we want, including the best car seats on the market (you will NEVER see me shamelessly begging on a company's website, to test a product even though there's no chance in hell they'd go for that kind of thing!), but even more-so, that he takes an active interest in this type of thing, and believes in it as much as I do. This stuff was not entirely my idea. Sure, I initially read the literature and developed an interest in it, but then I tossed it to him, and asked him what he thought. We've been on the same page with this from the day we learned of it, and I am really grateful that Thak is on board, and that the worst reaction I ever got from him was when I told him Orren was about to outgrow his Britax Diplomat in height, and that I wanted to get him the Radian XTSL, and Thak said, "Babe, it's gonna have to wait till payday. Will the Diplomat last him that long, or do we need to move the Marathon from my truck to your car in the meantime?" Mind you, payday was only a week away. I hear things from other moms whose husbands do not believe in extended rear-facing or extended harnessing, or who think it's ridiculous to buy the best car seats for it because they cost a lot, and they have to really fight to keep their kids safe in the car because daddy doesn't believe in it. I am so glad that Thak has taken it upon himself to become informed, and that he doesn't mind doing whatever it takes to keep our kids safe in the car. He's a good dad. He doesn't think he is since he's gone so much, but he is.