For the rest of [...]]]> If you are lucky enough to have all the kids in your family out of car seats and even through with booster seats . . . you can skip right past this email and only check in with The Hawthorne Auto Clinic when you need a great, local car mechanic.

For the rest of us who are still in the throws of navigating rear facing or front facing options and car seats vs. booster seats . . . Liz at Hawthorne Auto Clinic is our new best friend and a free and friendly resource.

While the rest of us may scan through those detailed directions only the first time we take our car seat out of the box or may never see that tricky little set of instructions, Liz knows more about car seats than you could ever imagine.

She wasn’t planning to become a car seat expert (officially a child passenger safety certified technician.) When the director of the local child safety seat resource center came through Hawthorne Auto Clinic looking for a location for a special car seat safety event, she mentioned that Liz, or someone at Hawthorne Auto Clinic, might want to get certified.

There’s a lot of training that goes into fixing cars so at first Liz tabled the idea, but she already knew the statistics showing that over 75% of car seats aren’t properly installed. She started to pay more attention to the cars coming in for service and discovered that a good half of the car seats she gave a little tug to were belted in way too loose to be safe.

When she found out the next training was in Seaside, she decided to turn a beach trip into a business trip and sat through 3 days of car seat training. What, you may want to know, can an instructor say about car seats for three whole days? Liz was skeptical but came out a convert, coming home after that long weekend feeling like the training had only scratched the surface.

The challenging part of car seat use is all the variables: all types of car seats going into all types of cars with all types of belts, tethers and anchors. You can hope you’ve done it all right or you can call up and ask for a free appointment with her to bring your car, seat and child in for a 45 minute – 1 ½ hour appointment (depending on the number of seats you are checking). She volunteers her time to help families get more acquainted with the equipment you have and she feels really good about helping you make sure you’ve got the safest set up for your child.

Liz does one complimentary car seat check a day (lots of other things need doing around the shop) between the hours of 11 and 4. If that doesn’t suit your schedule, the Child Safety Seat Resource Center http://www.childsafetyseat.org/calendar.html keeps a list of one day clinics – usually on weekends all around Portland. Be sure to bring things to distract or entertain your kids so you can work right along with her (it’s a hands on appointment with helpful training for you)

Most common things that she finds:

#1 Seat belt or tethers not attached tightly enough – it takes a knee into the seat or another person pressing while you pull on belts to get the seat as tight as it’s supposed to be (no more than 1 inch wiggle side to side).

#2 Seat belt lock mode not activated. Most cars have a way to lock the belt so you aren’t relying on a sharp impact to do so.

#3 A worn part that makes the car seat inoperable.

Liz and her husband Jim are two of the most low key people I know. They offer this service not to recruit business (they have plenty) but to share the knowledge that they know we can’t all spend three days to gather.

Thank you Liz and Jim for being Roost sponsors and for taking a bit of each day to keep our youngest community members safe!

To reach Liz for a car seat appointment (no drop ins please) or to schedule your car for service:

Hawthorne Auto Clinic

4307 SE Hawthorne Boulevard
Portland, OR 97215-3162
(503) 234-2119