Radian®

It’s definitely not a feature I’d normally look for in a car seat for a Civic, unless there were a confounding situation that would make it worth the extra space. If your child is tall or heavy for his age, you’ll need to be more careful to pick out a seat that will last. Petite kids can have more options that will work. For a Civic, I’d probably look at a Graco Extend2Fit. It’s a bit wide but it’s fairly compact front-to-back and should be a good fit. A downside is that the door opening in a Civic is a little tight and the Graco has kind of high sides which can be annoying until the child can climb in with assistance. On the other hand, with the new side impact standards I’m having a hard time thinking of a current seat that will fit well in a Civic and *doesn’t* have high sides. Diono is the only one that comes to mind that hasn’t been discontinued yet, but it’s too much of a space hog to use in a side seat in a Civic. It *might* fit in the center, but the last time I used one in a Civic it was a 2005 model year and the back seats have changed a lot since then so I’m not sure how well it would work. It can be a kinda finicky car seat for installation.

There's a Diono model that's approved for air travel that folds and isn't awful to carry. We had one, both my son and I loved it. We only replaced it due to an accident and needing a new one immediately.

We have 98 and 99th percentile kids and Diono car seats have saved us so much. We had a Graco baby car seat with base even though the Diono has insert for infants. It was just easier to carry baby and we used it for both kids as the were close in age. They are giant 3 and 5yos now and with the long expiration date and weight limit of 120lbs, they’ll be in them until high school. Second hand baby Bjorn bouncer was amazing. Anything food or potty related get the least complicated smoothest surface area products for easy cleaning. Ikea high chair, little partners wooden booster seat, and one piece potty seat.

We loved our Britax Boulevard but it was not at all good for bigger kids rear facing longer! I think the weight limit was 35 on latch install which some of my kids hit before age 2. We had to change to Diono Radian and Graco Extend to fit to keep them rear facing.

I’d recommend 3x of the diono seats. Their whole marketing thing was that you can fit 3 across in most cars. I found them easy to take apart to clean as well, although maybe that was because we just had so many and we did it a lot of times it got easy. On our last trip which had like a 3 hour drive each way, my wife was like “we should clean the car first”… I was like it’s just gonna be covered in damn snacks as soon as we leave the driveway, why bother.