Small Car with Two Children and Third on the Way

Does this vehicle have three seats in the back? If not, obviously it will be impossible to fit 3 car seats back there. If its absolutely necessary, the absolute best option (its still not ideal) is to put the oldest forward facing harnessed child in the front seat, put the seat all the way back, and disable the airbag. You never want to put a boostered child in the front seat, and you cannot put a rear facing child in the front seat, so you only option if you need to put one in front is the oldest harnessed forward facing child, which would be your 2yr old.

The Sunshine Kids Radian seats are the narrowest on the market, and easily fit 3 across in most vehicles. but if your vehicle won't seat three in the back (ther earen't three seatbelts, you cant fit three, the middle is a hump so you cant get a good install, etc) then the above option (2yr old in the harnessed car sat in the front with the airbag disabled and the seat all the way back) is your only other option.

1 mom found this helpful

When our family got to that point, we stopped thinking of the cars as "his" and "hers" and started thinking of them as "with children" and "without children." If my husband is going to have the kids, he takes the minivan and I drive the work commuter car. The time it wouldn't work is if husband dropped off all the kids at daycare before work and mom picked them up after work. I stay at home, so we never ran across this situation.

Good luck,
S.

I agree with the suggestion of the Sunshine Radian car seats. We have a 7 seat minivan, but have 4 kids and 1 due in the next week. So we have to fit a newborn, a 3 yr old, 5 yr old, 8 and 9 yr old as well as my husband and myself in it. We have the Radian-80 and it is made to be forward and rear facing, and you can fit 3 of them together in a back seat. We were not able to find one in a store, and had to order it online. Hope this helps!

not sure if you can view my questions or not, but i just asked this and got lots of responses. see if you can look me up, if not, i'll try to collect the best responses.

Not sure what you are looking for...

But why cant your husband just take the minivan when he has to have the kids and you drive his car???

We leave the car seats in one car...and then just swap drivers depending on who will be taking care of the kids.

Have you tried looking into the carseat Radian-65? They are a very narrow carseat. Perhaps you could take the car to the store and they can see if 2 would fit in there with your 5 year old in the middle?

M.

I agree with the Sunshine Kids Radian car seat. We have 2 of them and they are a great car seat and have a slim design.

We only have 1 child, but we also only have 1 carseat. Whoever needs to be with the baby takes the suv with the car seat. Our sedan remains car seat free for the most part.

I just found a car seat called the Combi Coccoro Convertible Car Seat. It is supposed to be super light, and fit 3 across. Fits infants up to 40 pounds, forward and rear facing. We are ordering 2 with our tax money! :) We have a Saturn Vue and are having a hard time finding a car seat for our infant to switch to as he gets bigger. We also have a 6 year old in a booster, and we aren't thrilled about our 2 year old's car seat. So more $$ spent on car seats for us.

We have a minivan and a cavalier. We have two kids and another one due in May. We arn't worrying about the cavalier because if my hubby needs to take the kids somewhere he will just take the van. Is this not an option for you. Make sure if you do take the suggestions on the radian that you make sure they fit all three before purchase, my one friend did this for their small car and then realized that they have to know replace all the seat buckles to fit the three seats properly.

It's POSSIBLE, but not EASY, to fit 3 seats in the back of many cars. I had two very big 5 point harness seats in the backseat of our car, with the booster in the middle, this week. It's a pain, and I wouldn't do it on a regular basis, but it was possible. And we also use one family car and just switch seats on the rare occasion that we need to use the ohter car.