Car Seats

Good Morning!
I'm hoping you can give me a hand with this. . .
Here's the story!

We drive a Subaru Impreza Wagon 07

Dh is 6'4", I'm 5'10"

We have a 9mo DD, currently in Graco Safeseat but will get getting a new seat for her birthday in Jan.

We are TTC#2 and would love to not have to get a new car right away. In order to have enough leg room, we currently put the safeseat in the middle of the backseat, then we can push our seats back as far as need be.

I'm under the impression that non-infant carrier seats take up less room, please correct me if I'm wrong! So we were thinking that once there are 2 babies, perhaps we could nix the infant carrier all together and have 2 convertible seats and be able to maintain the driver & passenger leg room.

Are there certain seats that take up less room than others? If you look at a seat's "specs" is the "footprint" the space it takes up, or just the space on the seat it takes up, and it will recline to stick out of the seat? I'm not sure if I'm asking these questions clear enough, but I hope you understand!

Let me know if I can clarify anything, thanks so much for your help!!

-Kelli

It is true that the convertible seats usually take up less room front-to-back than infant seats. This is particularly true for older babies whose seats can be installed more upright than the 45-degrees needed for infants.

There's not really a good way to tell from specs how the seat will install in your vehicle. It will hang "forward" more from the listed footprint, as you suspected. Probably the easiest way to figure it out would be to go to Babies-R-Us, as they'll let you try seats out in your car before buying, so you'd know what would work and what wouldn't.

You can certainly skip the infant seat for the next baby if you want to, though there are only certain convertible seats that have low enough harness slots to fit a newborn safely. Off the top of my head, the Radians would be good, or the Evenflo Triumph Advance, or I think the Graco MyRide 65. Hopefully someone who knows more will let you know. Do keep in mind that the convertible seat for a newborn will have to have the full 45* recline, so it may or may not be saving you space compared to an infant seat. Again, trying some in your car will probably be best.

One thing you could do is to get a smaller convertible seat to use for RF, knowing that you'll need to get a higher weight harnessed seat when the convertible is outgrown. The smaller convertibles that would take up less space would likely be outgrown at age 2-3, but would be good for RF as long as you get one that RF to 35 pounds. If it will work in your car however, I'd recommend getting a higher weight convertible seat, as there are some out now that RF to 40 or 45 pounds, and they also have taller shells which will accommodate that longer RF time by height as well. All of those seats should last to age 5-6 for most kids.