Every parent wants the best safety seat for her baby, and a convertible car seat will last your child from infanthood until about five or six years of age. As soon as your baby is born, you will need to have a safety seat ready for taking your little bundle of joy home from the hospital.
Some parents opt for a rear-facing infant only seat for the first year of their baby's life. The advantage of these seats is that they can be clicked into and out of their base, so that you can bring your baby inside without unbuckling her from the seat. Additionally, these seats can be snapped onto shopping carts which makes grocery shopping a simpler event for new mothers. The other benefit of an infant safety seat is that it can be clicked into a snap-and-go stroller base, which makes transitioning your infant from the car to a stroller a simple task.
However, as soon as your baby turns a year old, she will outgrow the infant seat, which will necessitate a new purchase of another seat. Thus, the infant categories of car seats have a remarkably short span of usefulness.
On the other hand, a convertible car seat can be positioned in the rear-facing position for your newborn baby, and turned around to face forward when she is older than one year, giving it a much longer span of usefulness. The two most popular convertible seats are the Britax Marathon 70 car seat reviews and the Evenflo Triumph LX convertible car seat. You can read convertible car seat reviews to gain an understanding of parents' experiences with various seats.
If you will regularly be using two different vehicles for transporting your baby, you may want to have an infant seat for one vehicle and a convertible seat for the other car. This will make your life much simpler, as the process of installing these seats into vehicles can be time consuming and require brute strength. Unless you have a climate controlled garage, you can be sure that the day you need to transfer your baby's seat from one car to the other will often be very hot, cold, or rainy, making the transfer that much more difficult.
Convertible seats also offer the advantage of a more upright position, which many babies appreciate. Many parents report that their children screamed in the infant seats and only calmed down during car travels when they were transitioned to a convertible seat.
One other advantage of a convertible car seat is its height. When a baby is sitting in an infant seat, she usually cannot see the passing scenery as the seat is positioned too low down in the car. Once a baby is moved to a convertible seat, she can see the view out the window, which will make her a much happier passenger.