Ten Clicks to Boost Booster Project

Good morning,

This morning (Sunday) I remembered to VOTE!  Here's what I'm voting for:

Safety Belt Safe U.S.A. is vying for a $25,000 grant from State Farm to run a booster seat project in Pasadena, CA.  With grant funding so short these days, we all need to support each other.  You can help -- without sending a dime.  All you need to do is go to the FaceBook page and vote. 
http://www.facebook.com/statefarm/app_376288832400015?app_data=Boosters-Are-For-Big-Kids

You can vote 10 times (just 10 clicks) each day from now until May 17th.  If everyone signed onto this blog did this, we would be giving them almost 5,000 votes!

I must confess I had to look up my FaceBook password, but now I'm in, it is simple. I even put "Vote for SBS USA" into my computer's calendar with a reminder!

So please vote for a cause we can ALL support.  And while you are at it, please ask your colleagues to vote, too.

Deborah

Shopping With Kids Can Be More Than Difficult—It Can Be Downright Dangerous!-DD

Over time, they say, parents remember only the good times and block out the difficult ones.  Why, then, do I have such vivid memories of grocery shopping with young children?    

With an infant in tow, this outing was always a dreaded struggle for me.  One day I’d try carrying the baby in a front pack, the next a backpack.  Maybe shopping using the baby stroller? Each plan I’d devise seemed workable, but I’d nonetheless leave the grocery store a frazzled mess with a fraction of my intended purchases.

Back in those days, we had another option:  infant CRs had built-in clips so they could be attached to the seating area of the shopping cart.  Aside from posing a fall hazard, I found that, once attached, I couldn’t get the darn thing back off the cart!  My fumbling attempts to remove the device from the cart were enough to convince me—riding atop a shopping cart isn’t safe for baby!

Of course, today’s CR manufacturers all agree.  These clips are long gone from today’s models and all say that CRs should never be used in or on shopping carts.  So it was certainly sad for me to hear that a Macon, GA, 3-month-old died just a few months ago when, strapped into his infant seat, he toppled off a cart in a grocery store parking lot.

This spurred my interest in researching shopping cart safety, and I was really surprised by what I learned.  For instance, did you know that in the U.S. we have a voluntary standard for shopping cart safety, but that this standard fails to address basic stability issues?  And that several years ago, the AAP formally requested, to no avail, that the Consumer Product Safety Commission revise these standards to help prevent the more than 21,000 annual injuries to children under five due to shopping cart incidences?  

This and other interesting facts about the shopping cart as an oft-overlooked transportation risk to children can be found in the most current issue of SRN.  This article has also been posted at www.saferidenews.com.  Denise Donaldson

When a Picture is Worth More Than 10,000 Words…

SRN Website Invites You to a Gallery of the Oddities of the LATCH World

The newest feature on our website is the LATCH Gallery. It‘s like a rogue’s gallery, featuring the unusual, if not to say “weird,” LATCH anchors we’ve found in vehicles.

Denise and Katrina, SRN’s crack LATCH vehicle team, started the gallery by collecting photos of anchors they’ve seen while visiting auto shows and checking vehicles. Simply by taking a stroll through the gallery you will find it easier to recognize the possible variations, making trouble-shooting in the field easier for CPSTs.

I’m sure our intrepid LATCH investigators haven’t seen every odd anchor out there. If you have found an unusual configuration hiding in a vehicle, please inform all of us by contributing photos to the gallery.

You’ll find a submission form on our LATCH Gallery page.

Deborah