Don't Make the Mistake We Did...Please Read!

     I almost hate to write about what happened to us on the way home with the grandsons Friday night, but I decided that if it happened to us...it just might happen to someone else. We met our grandson's mother about an hour from our house at 6:00 p.m. Friday night. After making certain that both boys were secure in their car seats, had Happy Meals (ugh) in their laps and were all settled in, we started for home.

     We have a large SUV. I know, we aren't being very "green" but we travel often and we like the space. It does have child locks, but we had disabled them because to be honest, most people don't like to be forced to be locked into a vehicle and have to ask the driver to "let me out of here"! Considering that we raised 2 children of our own and had 100's of others in our cars over the years without a problem, we simply didn't consider what could happen.

     As we were driving down the interstate at somewhere between 65-70 mph, our just turned 2-year-old grandson opened the car door. I heard the air sound and yelled at my husband to STOP THE CAR! Luckily, we were in the right lane. Luckily, the door didn't swing wide open until we stopped the car. Luckily, no one hit us from behind as we pulled off the highway. Luckily, it was a full 10 minutes after getting back on the interstate that the same busy 2-year-old unhooked his seat belt and therefore was no longer attached to his car seat. This was a new car seat, as the old one he crawled out from under the straps the last time he was here. He was 2 last weekend. At 2, my kids were still lumps. They sat where we put them, they didn't unlock house doors, climb out of cribs, go outside without asking or open the door of a moving vehicle.

     Needless to say, our child locks are now hooked up again...but it certainly didn't stop him from unhooking the seat belt again yesterday. I am only talking about this because it scared me to death...not so much what did happen, but what could have happened. We have our grandsons about once a month, so we had no idea that he could do the tricks he can. Don't get me wrong, he is as sweet as they come and is just curious and fearless. We are just so careful with them and yet we still could have had a tragedy. We learned our lesson about the door locks. I wish I could say he learned a lesson too, but I doubt it! I hope that we are the only ones out there that had disabled the child locks, but somehow I doubt that too! We did have a great weekend with them and I'll have more pictures later in the week. Thanks for reading this.