We're going all European when we add baby 3 to our family, and keeping our current Nissan Rogue instead of upgrading to an SUV with three rows of seats, or opting for my dream car, the Volkswagen R0utan. I know, I know, it's totally not cool to actually desire a mini van, but I want a car that I can open from the house so that I can send my kids out the door while I grab all the last second stuff. I want to be able to move around and dole out snacks, or Kleenex, or toys when we're on long car trips, without having to pull over. The list goes on and on. But, I digress, this is supposed to be about my favorite new car seat shopping resource, Elite Car Seats.com.
We've spent the last month trying to find the perfect combination of car seats to fit three across in the back seat of our Rogue. Without Elite Car Seats, this job would have been much, much harder. Elite Car Seats tells you just about everything you want to know about a car seat or booster. They have handy little charts to help you compare models at a glance. This includes that hard to find data on whether or not a car seat is FAA approved! Once we narrowed down our list to the seats we felt would be the safest, we used the specifications tab on the individual seats to find the one with the narrowest footprint. This might not seem like that big of a deal, but it's hard to find details on how wide a car seat is, even when you go directly to the manufacturer's site. There are many, many other reasons to love Elite Car Seats.com. As a source of information, I'm not sure that there is another site out there that
can even compare, and I also found the prices to be perfectly competitive with other stores. Plus, they offer free shipping on orders over $99. As we all know, it's not hard to spent $100 when you're buying new car seats!
So, what's the verdict on the three across car seats? If you have three kids in convertible car seats, then the Sunshine Kids Radian is the way to go. At only 17" across, you can easily get three of these across the seat of a car. Since Nadia is now 4, we opted to move her up to a booster seat. We went with the Maxi-Cosi Rodi XR given its ultra-narrow 15.5" seat base. Issac is moving from his Britax Roundabout to a Sunshine Kids Radian. Baby 3 will ride in a Graco SnugRide until he or she moves up to the Britax Roundabout. That's the combo that worked the best for us.
If you are planning on moving your child from a car seat into a booster, I would highly recommend checking out the special report that the Institute for Highway Safety published on their Best Bets for belt-positioning booster seats. Armed with this information, we felt much more confident in our choice to move our 4-year old up to a booster seat.

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