Preemies and Car Seats

We had already had a preemie so we thought we knew everything we needed to know about preemies. We were wrong.

Apparently a lot of car seats are only rated safe for babies 5 lbs and up. And if you have a baby coming home who is less than 5 lbs and your car seat is a 5 and up one the hospital will not do the car seat test with your baby and they will not let you come home with her until you have one rated safe for 4 lbs and up. Our last preemie was 5 lbs when he came home, so this didn't come up last time. But it did this time. So we ended up having to buy a new car seat instead of using the one a friend had given us.

My advice to parents: if you bought new, don't take the car seat out of the box until you're at least 36 weeks (and hopefully your baby won't be as small as mine) and keep the receipt. If you bought used, reserve some money for this just in case. Or you can just make sure your car seat is rated for 4 lbs and up and not just 5 lbs, thought I've been told that those might be a little bit more expensive and harder to find, as most infant car seats are only rated for 5 lbs and up. We managed to find one at Walmart for less than $80. I really prefer the thicker head support on the one we got than what usually comes on infant carriers.  Looking at Amazon.com, only the Safety 1st car seats like the Safety 1st onBoard 35 Infant Car Seat are rated as safe for 4 lbs that are under $100.

Added later: I'd like to say a few words on the term "car seat." When I see the two terms separately, I think of the seat that comes as part of a car. When I think of the thing that you add on top of a car seat for babies and children, I think of it as one word: "carseat." Spell check, however, does not approve of that term, so I changed all the red squiggliy underlined words to something it didn't protest. But in my heart, it's a carseat. Maybe I should have just used the term "carrier."
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I am not paid for reviews (unfortunately.) All opinions are my own. This post contains Amazon affiliate links. The Walmart link is not an affiliated link; I put it there because the carrier is cheaper at Walmart than on Amazon.com.

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