Ethan Tsai

UCSF states they take a more “holistic” approach to deciding when a baby is fit to leave the Intensive Care Nursery to go home. It means there are no hard metrics such as minimum weight. It also means it is difficult for parents to plan (“he’ll probably be ready in a few days”). We had to scramble to buy the car seat, install the base into the car, and practice fiddling with all the buckles and straps. Given the lack of preparation time, we had to conscript some unwilling test subjects that happened to be about the same size as Ethan:

Monkeying Around

Curious George

On the big day, his final exam was the ominous-sounding CAR SEAT TEST. The nurse sticks him in our car seat and makes sure he can survive being in it for at least an hour (a typical ride home from the hospital to suburbia). Here is Ethan in his sporty red (“Lotus”) SnugRide car seat, ready for a day at the track:

Ready to Race

Ready!

After the hour was up, the baby in the racing-red car seat was painstakingly strolled into the station wagon.

I normally weave my way home all the way down Oak, but today I drove extremely conservatively in the right-hand “slow” traffic lane (except for right-turn-only lanes).