by Car seats are not built like they once were. In this day and age, they are high-tech travel compartments that most children find pretty comfortable. Now the reason for a baby seat is to keep them safe and they are constantly check and re-checked so they they meet the safety guidelines that are needed.
And since you believe they are designed to be secure for your child, you most likely wouldn’t have second thoughts using it until now. Now recently this Scottish mothers is warning others of this danger.
She wants every parent to know that keeping your baby in the car seat for too long can have serious health consequences. Kristi Clark and her husband Christopher had strapped their newborn into the car seat for a ride that ended up taking two hours. And by the time, Kristi managed to check on the infant. She was foaming at the mouth because she had suffered from oxygen deprivation.
Kristi could tell something was wrong with her newborn after she and Christopher got stuck in traffic on their way home. She couldn’t get out the car to check on the baby, so she had to wait. But when they got home, mom took Harper, the baby, out of the car seat and saw the horror.
“When we got home it was way past Malena’s bedtime so brought Harper in her car seat and she stayed in there for 15 minutes as we got Malena into bed,” Kristi told the Daily Record. “My husband got Harper out and put her on his knee, but she couldn’t get comfy so he laid her down on her mat and she was kicking about. I told him her lips looked blue and then he pointed out how red her cheeks were.”
Little did Kristi know, but because Harper was stuck in the car seat for so long, she had been deprived of oxygen.
Then a scene for a horror movie played out. Harper clenched her jaw and then started foaming at the mouth.
“It was so scary. My husband was holding her and patting her back, and I was trying to get her mouth open to make sure she didn’t swallow her tongue, but her jaw was clenched shut.”
Kristi was horrified. Her world changed in an instant because she knew she could lose her newborn.
“It wasn’t like a normal seizure, she was arching her back and throwing her head back.”
And then they were forced to throw the suffering newborn back into her car seat and rush her to the hospital.
“The car journey was horrendous. I was trying to make sure she was breathing, but I was shaking so much I couldn’t tell. My husband kept asking if she was breathing and I just had to say, ‘I don’t know.’”
Then mom thought the words that no mother wants to think: “We’re going to lose her.”
The hospital staff figured out the problem quickly. And they got the newborn breathing again. She was going to make a full recovery.
“When the consultant told us it was the car seat, I couldn’t believe it… I couldn’t understand why nobody had ever told us.”
Kristi wants to spread awareness about the dangers of keeping a newborn in a car seat for too long.
