It's Official!

Last week I did a 3 1/2 day training to become a certified child passenger safety technician! I have wanted to do this for a long time, but the timing was finally right. The training was held in College Station, about two hours from our house. Kristina was generous enough to let us stay with her and she watched Cannon for me! It was really nice because the training was just a few minutes from her home.

The first three days were the actual training which included classroom instruction as well as hands-on stuff. I had a lot of fun at the training and it wasn't too difficult for me, but the training would be pretty intense for someone who didn't have much of a background with using car seats. The fourth day was a car seat check up event from 9-12:30. The event was huge, 193 inspections total! Nationwide, 80% of car seats are misused in some way, but in Texas it's almost 100%! That's not okay! I know it sounds weird that every single thing must be used correctly on a car seat. But improper use of car seats have caused a lot of injuries and death, most of which were preventable. And unfortunately car seats are huge pains to get them in perfectly! That's why this is so important. That's why I took the class so that I could educate and help families and advocate for children who can't do it for themselves.

Keeping those statistics in mind, every car seat that I checked was misused. And only one child arrived correctly in her seat belt. Here are the rest of the stats for the entire check up:

• 193 inspections

• 2 booster seat children arrived correctly restrained and four older children arrived correctly in seat belts

• 134 new child safety seats were distributed

• 80 old/unsafe seats were collected

• 37 children arrived unrestrained or incorrectly restrained in seat belts

I had a fun time and so did Cannon. He learned lots of new things there like how to go down the stairs and how to stack the wooden ring stackers. Unfortunately, Cole learned how to scream from Cannon. Sorry. It seems like Cannon learns something new everyday. He can say: Dada, Momma, dog, duck ("dut"), and boo (when he pulls a blanket off his face). He is fascinated by things he can manipulate with his hands like blocks, cords, doors, lids, and locks. He can stack two, almost three, blocks and he LOVES to put cheerios into small containers or open bottles. This can keep him entertained for quite some time. He is getting pretty good at following simple commands such as: sit down, knock on the door, clap, get the ball, etc. And he can throw a ball overhand! Also, the screams have come back. When he wants something or for some other unknown reason, he will scream at the top of his lungs as high and loud as he can!


Cole and Cannon are best friends! Cole smothered Cannon in hugs and kisses about a thousand times each day! Towards the end, Cannon had enough and tried to push away Cole.


Here is Miss Lyla. She has the brightest face and gives the biggest smiles!


I introduced blueberries to Cannon which have turned out to be one of his favorite foods.