у нас спёрли сиденье детское из машины! с паркинга нашего. мы в грустях. скорее, больше всего в грустях о том, что надо бы двигаться - на Луну, к примеру. потому что достаёт бесконечныж хаос этого города дивного, любимого.
Ёлка спешит ходить и иногда забывает о том, что она не птица, выглядит подчас как пингвин ;) очень забавная девица, заводная, как говорит моя маменька, "вся в маму". мне кажется, что дочь гораздо уверенней в себе. и вообще намного радостнее, хоть и серьёзная часто.
вот, "радость ходячая":
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вот, отличная статья из Таймс, о сиденьях, кстати, детских-же. что и требовалось доказать...
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On a recent Monday morning, nearly 20 police officers gathered
in Clarkstown, N.Y., for a four-day seminar. They had assembled
to fight one of modernity's great scourges: child deaths in
motor-vehicle crashes. Each officer was given a 345-page
training manual issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA). At seminar's end, each would be
certified as a ''child passenger safety technician,'' which
primarily means that they would be experts in the installation
and use of child car seats.
Why does it take four days to learn about car seats? Because any
given seat is a tangle of straps, tethers and harnesses built by
one of dozens of manufacturers whose products must be secured by
the diverse seat-belt configurations of any passenger vehicle
sold in the United States. According to the NHTSA manual, more
than 80 percent of car seats are improperly installed.
So over the course of those four days, there were many questions
to be answered. But one question about car seats is rarely even
asked: How well do they actually work?
They certainly have the hallmarks of an effective piece of
safety equipment: big and bulky, federally regulated, hard to
install and expensive. (You can easily spend $200 on a car
seat.) And NHTSA data seem to show that car seats are indeed a
remarkable lifesaver. Although motor-vehicle crashes are still
the top killer among children from 2 to 14, fatality rates have
fallen steadily in recent decades -- a drop that coincides with
the rise of car-seat use. Perhaps the single most compelling
statistic about car seats in the NHTSA manual was this one:
''They are 54 percent effective in reducing deaths for children
ages 1 to 4 in passenger cars.''
But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it
turns out, is this: Compared with a child's riding completely
unrestrained. There is another mode of restraint, meanwhile,
that doesn't cost $200 or require a four-day course to master:
seat belts.
For children younger than roughly 24 months, seat belts plainly
won't do. For them, a car seat represents the best practical way
to ride securely, and it is certainly an improvement over the
days of riding shotgun on mom's lap. But what about older
children? Is it possible that seat belts might afford them the
same protection as car seats?
The answer can be found in a trove of government data called the
Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which compiles police
reports on all fatal crashes in the U.S. since 1975. These data
include every imaginable variable in a crash, including whether
the occupants were restrained and how.
Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result:
among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those
traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat
belts. There are many reasons, of course, that this raw data
might be misleading. Perhaps kids in car seats are, on average,
in worse wrecks. Or maybe their parents drive smaller cars,
which might provide less protection.
But no matter what you control for in the FARS data, the results
don't change. In recent crashes and old ones, in big vehicles
and small, in one-car crashes and multiple-vehicle crashes,
there is no evidence that car seats do a better job than seat
belts in saving the lives of children older than 2. (In certain
kinds of crashes -- rear-enders, for instance -- car seats
actually perform worse.) The real answer to why child auto
fatalities have been falling seems to be that more and more
children are restrained in some way. Many of them happen to be
restrained in car seats, since that is what the government
mandates, but if the government instead mandated proper
seat-belt use for children, they would likely do just as well /
without the layers of expense, regulation and anxiety associated
with car seats.
NHTSA, however, has been pushing the car-seat movement ever
further. The agency now advocates that all older children
(usually starting at about age 4) ride in booster seats, which
boost a
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