Monday Q&A | Car Seats, Kneading, & Overnight Rolls

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

I just wanted to see what you do about car seats for your kids. You mentioned that Zoe can’t unbuckle her car seat, so I’m assuming that means she’s still in a harnessed seat, which is great!
I know that a lot of people use the same car seat for all their kids or buy one second hand to be more frugal, but that’s not safe. Most car seats expire after 6 years or so and will no longer be effective in a crash. And if you buy second hand you never know if the seat has been in an accident or misused.

So, I was wondering what you did/do about obtaining car seats without blowing your budget (they can be very expensive!).

-Rebecca

Yep, Zoe AND Sonia are both still in 5-point harness seats. Joshua and Lisey were both in booster seats by this age, but neither of my two younger girls have gotten heavy enough or tall enough to be promoted.

It’s kind of a bummer because I thought I’d be done with car seats by this point, but given my girls’ small sizes, I really do feel like they’re safer in their car seats than in booster seats.

Safety should be your first concern when you’re shopping for a car seat, and saving money should be a somewhat distant second.

In case not everyone is aware, car seats do expire at a certain point because the straps can no longer be trusted.

In case you’re skeptical, here’s a video showing how poorly an expired car seat works in a crash. (email subscribers, you’ll have to click on over to my actual blog to see this…my apologies!)

Because of this, buying a used car seat is a somewhat risky proposition unless you can know for sure that the seat is not expired and has not previously been in a crash.

If you decide to buy used, check for an expiration date. Car seats should have a sticker with an expiration date on them somewhere, and if there’s no sticker, I wouldn’t recommend using the seat. Also, I would only recommend buying a used car seat from someone who can honestly assure you that the seat has not been in an accident (like someone you know personally, not a random stranger on Craig’s List).

If you decide to buy new, don’t feel like you need to buy a designer car seat with cup holders and extraneous fancy features…something more basic will work just fine because all car seats have to meet safety regulations.

Also, if you’re planning to have multiple children use the seat before it expires, I definitely recommend purchasing a seat with neutral colors (Incidentally, what is up with all the gender-specific baby gear out there? Will you really want to use your pastel pink stroller if your next baby is a boy??).

Once you’ve chosen the seat you want, check around on the internet to see which retailer has the best price. Target was the most inexpensive (around $100) when we checked, so that’s where we bought Sonia’s and Zoe’s seats.

I have a question for you about bread baking…well the kneading in particular. When you show pictures of turning out the dough before you start kneading, it always looks so thin. Whenever mine is at that stage and I turn it out (on a WELL floured board) it is still so sticky that I can’t do anything with it besides scrape it off the board into the trash (which breaks my heart & wallet). Any tips on what I’m missing here?

-Kate

I use a dough scraper just like this one(that’s an affiliate link to my online Amazon store) to help me with the early stages of kneading. You can see a photo of that in my post about how to knead bread dough , but if you’re a super beginner at bread baking, you might want to make your dough a little bit thicker before turning it out to knead.

Also, if you’ve got a stand mixer, I highly recommend using it to give the dough a good initial mixing…this helps the dough to be a little more organized by the time you turn it out onto the counter.

If your dough is too sticky, working some more flour into it should fix the problem and that way you won’t have to waste the batch of dough.

The new camera body I bought does actually take video, so one of these days I want to do a vlog about how to knead bread…I just need to do it when Mr. FG is around to be the camera man (my camera is too heavy for our cheapie tripod and I do NOT want to risk it falling onto the wood floor!).

I have a couple of yeast sweet roll recipes that I’d love to try for a holiday morning but I know I will not have the time that morning to prepare them from the beginning of the recipe. Do you know/think that I can make them ahead of time and let them rise overnight like the overnight cinnamon twists/rolls or do I need to make some sort of slight change in the recipe to be able to do that.

-Jen S.

As far as I know, almost any recipe will work that way…I’ve tried it with a number of recipes that weren’t specifically designed for an overnight rise, and the results have been good.

Of course, if you want to make sure that this will work, you could always suffer through an experimental batch one Saturday morning before Christmas. You know, for the happy-holiday-eating cause. 😉

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Readers, the floor (er, the comments section) is yours!

Today’s 365 post: Coming on Wednesday