Where Is the Car Seat? A Legal Thriller

Dispatches from the caboose years

Nobody warns you about the caboose years.

You have older kids. Teenagers, even. Kids who have survived to an age where they can feed themselves, operate a shower without supervision, and navigate most, er some, of life's minor emergencies without calling you. You did that. You know how this parenting thing goes. You have the experience, the scars, the institutional knowledge.

And then, later than planned and later than your back would have preferred, you do it again. One more. The caboose. And the caboose, as it turns out, has opinions.

My daughter is eight months old. Doodle-bop. She is the best thing in any room she enters, and she knows it. My wonderful nurse of a wife saves premature babies three days a week. On those days, my contribution to society is to get the princess ready for daycare. I have embraced this arrangement. We have a routine. I am, I would say, getting pretty good at it.

Unless there is a single snare in the process. And last week, there was a pretty big snare in the process.

To fully comprehend the snare, you must understand the system. Elegant in theory, and arrived at for reasons I can no longer fully reconstruct. Probably less waste. Maybe I'm just cheap. Either way: two bases, one car seat. The seat snaps in and out, one base per car, goes wherever the baby goes. Foolproof.

The system works great. Usually.

When the baby is home, the car seat sits unobtrusively in the corner of the dining room. Before you say anything, just know it works fine and nobody was using that corner. I came around that corner that morning fully expecting to find it sitting there in its spot, waiting patiently.

It was not there.

Fine. These things happen. I checked the living room. I checked the foyer. Back through the kitchen. Down the hall.

My stomach tightened. I had court that morning. Just let that sit for a second. Court. I could already picture it. "Apologies for the drool, Your Honor, co-counsel is teething." Wait. How would I even get her there.

No. The seat's here. The seat is always here.

I made another loop. Living room, dining room, foyer, kitchen, bedroom. I had just missed it. It had to be here somewhere, waiting to jump out from behind the couch. I checked behind the couch. It didn't.

A third loop. Starting to feel less like a search and more like desperation. It must have been moved. Bathroom? No. Back porch? No. Upstairs, one of the older kids' rooms? I went up there. It wasn't. The teenagers had made it to school for the day. Dad doesn't rush on Doodle-bop mornings, another benefit of the caboose. Their smell, however, still haunted the upstairs. Teenage boys. If you know, you know.

Then it dawned on me. My wife, my beautiful, wonderful, amazing wife, had taken the car seat with her to work, where it was presumably doing great.

What do I do? The second car seat.

We have Doodle-bop's next seat in the garage, still in the box. One of those convertible deals that starts rear-facing for infants, then flips forward-facing when she's old enough for the toddler configuration. The full journey, one seat. Optimus Prime, basically, but bigger.

I set Doodle-bop in the pack-n-play with the slow, deliberate gentleness of a man who has done this before and knows exactly how the next three seconds are going to go. She looked at me. I took one step back. The announcement began. Not crying, exactly. More like a formal press release stating that she had been wronged and intended to pursue all available remedies.

I retrieved the box from the garage at a pace I would describe as manic. Came back, grabbed her out of the pack-n-play because I am an unashamed softie. I opened the box with one hand. The instructions unfolded to roughly the length of a road atlas. Several languages. The diagrams were not what I would call helpful. They appeared to be written for someone with a background in structural engineering and a lot of free time. I read the first page. Doodle-bop wiggled and pushed against my face, trying to get down. I sat her down. She complained with the fury of a banshee. Picked her back up and started the second page. She wiggled and pushed against my face again. If I'd had a hand free, I would have slapped my own head. I've installed car seats before. How hard could this one be.

I carried her out to the car and set her in the floorboard while I worked. She found something down there immediately, a receipt I think, and became completely absorbed with eating it.

Now, to get the seat in and attached, I needed to move the driver seat forward. A little, I thought. I moved it a little. Still didn't fit. Transform, damn you. A little more. More. More. The seat went forward in small increments, each one a concession, until finally I got the angles I needed, got the hooks seated, got the thing cinched down. I stood up and declared victory.

Doodle-bop was still studying the drooly receipt like it contained the meaning of life.

I loaded her in and buckled her up. The seat, rear-facing, occupied the entire back seat behind the driver. The entire thing. Not most of it. All of it. Grey foam and padding from door to midline. Optimus Prime in full truck form.

I got in the driver seat and reached for the lever to slide it back to its normal position. The car seat behind me communicated, through the simple physics of being enormous, that we would not be doing that today.

I was already late. I assessed the situation. I turned sideways, sucked in, and threaded myself into the gap between the seat and the steering wheel like I was trying not to wake someone up. Got the door shut. We were in.

The steering wheel and I had a very close morning together. The kind of close where you know each other's secrets. When I needed to signal a lane change, I used what was available. I will say pec, because I'd rather not say nipple.

Doodle-bop slept the entire way to daycare. Peaceful. Unbothered.

Court was fine. Nobody drooled on the judge.

This time.