Author: Belinda Smith
When I found out I was pregnant I was driving a single cab Proton Jumbuck Ute! Great for transporting my dogs but definitely not a car you would find in the family garage! Looking at our finances we decided we could comfortably afford something like a small SUV. This is of course under the assumption that we were having one baby. After the complete shock of finding out we were in fact having three babies we knew that the small SUV was not going to cut the multiple mustard!
So we started to research.
The first thing we did was to work out what the slimmest carseat was on the market. We then took the width of one, multiplied it by three so we could determine how wide the back seat of the new car needed to be.
Once we had that knowledge we went to a few car yards. By the time a car salesman would make his way out and say “Can I help you?” our answer was invariably “No” as we had already measured the backseat and discovered it was too small to fit the three seats across.
We could have gone up to a minivan, or the ever popular Kia Carnival, but we were already stretching our original car budget and just could not afford this type of car.
Choosing a car for our babies
We finally settled on a Kia Sorento which is a seven seater and had enough room in the boot for a triple pram. By the time we had made our choice I was about twenty weeks pregnant and was worried I wouldn’t fit behind the steering wheel to do a test drive!
Luckily, it was end of financial year time and there were some great deals around. Understandably, I was still concerned about spending a substantial amount of money and not having the car seats fit when it came time to install them.
Thankfully we had a salesman who was a father himself and took pity on me! He went out of his way to ease my fears by taking two car seats out of his own car, and another from a colleague, and set them up in one of the demonstration cars to ensure they would fit.
Confident everything would work out we went ahead with the purchase. The car is now five years old and has never missed a beat. There were a few heart stopping moments during the whole hour it took for the installer to put the three car seats in. (There was a lot of sweating and swearing from both of us!)
What to think about when buying a car for triplets
My advice for any prospective multiple parents is to do your research, think about what you want and need from your car and don’t forget the boot space. You need room for double, or in our case triple, baby items so make sure you can fit everything and everyone in!
Happy car hunting!
You can read more of Belinda’s blogs below:
Finding out we were pregnant with identical triplets
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