Car seat lady how to#
Car seat lady install#

(The expectant mom takes notes.) Now the moment of truth: the dad tries the maneuver himself. (Her tool kit also includes a carpenter’s level, a locking clip, and a baby doll.) Then she does a move in which she stands on top of the base and pushes her back against the roof, to provide leverage, while the expectant dad struggles to fasten the taut belt. First, to insure that the baby’s breathing won’t be restricted, she wedges some rolled-up bath towels under the rear-facing car-seat base so that it’s aligned at the proper forty-five degrees. Watching her work with a car seat is a bit like watching a violinist tune her instrument: she handles each device with a professional briskness, and knows its quirks and personality.

Car seat lady install#

Most people, Baer pointed out, do not install their car seat tightly enough (a good sideways tug should move the seat less than an inch). Still, she says, “When I hear that someone is an engineer, that scares me.” Baer knows that these men are just trying to think creatively. A number of fathers have tried to use all three seat belts as a harness. Over the years, she’s seen some crazy jerry-rigs: bungee cords, AstroTurf, plastic piping. She started to leave her phone number on people’s windshields, informing them, in polite notes, that their car seat was improperly installed and that she would be happy to help out. Every time she glanced into a car, it seemed, she saw a potentially dangerous car seat. When Baer first came to New York City, she found it difficult to walk down the street. Upon spotting one, Baer would hold a sign up to the window: “Please Fasten Your Seat Belt.” If the driver complied, she would flip the sign over: “Thank You.” She has only recently stopped being embarrassed about this.

When Baer was a kid, she and her mother would drive around town, looking for motorists who weren’t buckled up. Her grandfather was a stickler for fire prevention, and her mother, who began installing car seats in Baltimore in 1984, was the original C.S.L. She comes from something of a safety-obsessed family.

Car seat lady how to#

Thankfully, in Manhattan there’s an expert for everything, and if you’re expecting a son and have no idea how to get him home from the hospital, you can call Alisa Baer, the Car Seat Lady.īaer, a twenty-five-year-old medical student with curly black hair and a nonsense-free manner, doesn’t have any kids herself, but she can tell you which car seats will and will not fit in your Volvo V40. This seemingly simple job has ruined plenty of golfing Saturdays, even for guys who solved Rubik’s Cube when they were younger. Men, of course, do not give birth, but they have their own shadow form of labor: installing the baby’s car seat.