Review on 🌸 Evenflo SureRide DLX Convertible Car Seat in Sugar Plum: Safety and Comfort in Style by Alicia Jones

This car seat is great when it's on and baby is in it, but it's hard to get them to do that. We have a couple of these for our twins. We're obviously very happy with the price and the fact that Consumer Reports gave it the highest safety rating (along with the other three recommended models). And they fit perfectly in our rear-facing Rav4. But we're surprised at how difficult it is to use the seats. As other reviews point out, getting the right seats is very difficult. I am not at all surprised to read that even some car seat specialists cannot do this. The problem is that there isn't really a lever to tighten the LATCH connectors. I'm a big, burly guy, and even after shoving all my weight into the seat and tightening the harness, I couldn't get the seats tight enough - even at the most stable point, there was still a lot of wobble. Luckily, our Rav4 has reclining seatbacks. So I reclined the seats a little more than usual, tightened the seat belts, and then returned the seats to their upright position. This moves the seatback slightly forward, effectively tightening the fastener. Of course, this trick only works on cars with reclining seats, so otherwise I'd probably put the seats back. The other big issue is tightening the straps. First, the straps are connected at the bottom, so it's very easy to overtighten one side and loosen the other. Once you figure out what's going on, it's easy enough to reach your baby's hip and sag a little on the stretched side, but it definitely takes practice to do well. And that's another thing you don't want to deal with when you're trying to get out of the house. To make matters worse, the belt tensioning mechanism isn't smooth: the belts have connections in really awkward spots. which snag around corners, and they go through some relatively sharp corners (not so sharp that I'm worried about cutting myself, but sharp enough to make the belt difficult to move). I would say that it is literally impossible to adjust the harness properly by simply pulling the strap on the child's feet. Again, there is a trick here. While the child is rear-facing, you can tighten the straps by looping them around the back and tugging to achieve the desired tension. Once you have the correct tension, you can take up the slack by pulling on the straps on the legs. I don't know how things will go if we have to flip them forward, but I'm hoping those awkward connections don't end up in the right places to get in the way because more straps will keep bigger kids busy and if I had to again Buy seats, I would just bite the bullet and shell out more money for one of the other top notch seats: Graco Size4Me 65, Graco Head Wise 65 or even the most expensive but popular Chicco NextFit.