One of the more unique things about living in New York City, especially Manhattan, is that most expectant parents will not own a car. That is a very different story than for most Americans in this country, who rely on their car just to travel one block since they probably aren’t used to walking even that little. What that also tends to mean for expectant Manhattan dwelling parents is that they will not have a car to have an infant car seat permanently installed inside of it, which means… well, you either have to get everywhere by foot or train/bus, or you have to get a car seat that doesn’t require a base and get used to installing it quickly just with a seat belt in cabs and Uber/Lyfts/ride shares.

So today, after renting a car to take a trip to Costco for our last major haul before Pookie Bear arrives, we spent the last hour of our Zipcar time figuring out how to install the car seat with the seat belt in multiple ways. It’s definitely not as intuitive or straightforward as I’d like, and we had to try it a few times before (I think?) we got it right. Installing it with a base would be trickier and likely take more time, but given that we don’t own a car and would likely, at most, only use that in Australia when we have access for weeks at a time to a single car, we didn’t really bother with going over the instructions for that.

It likely will be a bit nerve racking doing it for the first trip home from the hospital, but hopefully it will go smoothly and the Uber driver won’t dock our star rating for taking too long. I mean, this WILL be our very first time doing it in real time…