Seatbelt Mania

My wife and I grew up in the 70s. Seatbelts were something you pushed between down deep between the seats so you could squish a couple more kids into the back seat. I was one of four kids and there was no such thing as a mini-van. For most of my life, all four of us squished into the back seat of a two-door sedan. If one of us brought a friend along, the smallest kid was thrown on top of the rest of them.

We camped a lot. We had a pickup camper that sat in the back of dad’s pickup for the summer. Mom and dad sat in the pickup and the four of us, plus friends, hung out in back. There wasn’t a seat belt in the entire rig. The closest thing was an old road we used to dry out towels. As we drove if one of us kids needed something or if mom needed to make lunch, we climbed through the little window between the camper and the pickup.

Fast forward to now. We have a mini-van that claims to seat eight. We have booster seats and car seats galore. Although there are only five of us in my family, we don’t feel comfortable taking along more than two of the kids’ friends because of the size of the booster seats. My dad would have taken all the seats out of the back and piled my family and all of my cousins too.
We were backing out of our driveway and my wife hadn’t clicked in her seatbelt yet. The belt was in her hand. Clicking was eminent. She screamed at me to stop the car. I thought I ran over the cat. No. She just wasn’t clicked in yet. She was almost clicked in. She would probably had been clicked in by the time we reached the street but just not yet.