Which seat?

 Now with only a few hundred grams to go before the dreaded 12kgs, the search for a new seat to keep the monstar rear-facing began. Where to start? You can't just pop to the shop, so internet here I come!
After spending what seemed like an absolute fricken eternity looking at seats on overseas sites, as well as joining a car seat forum and reading through posts, questions and recommendations on there, and only just before my head was ready to explode with an overload of information, we decided on a Radian XTSL.

We chose the Radian for a few reasons.


* Radians are one of the safest car seats on the market.

* The Radians have one of highest rear-facing limits available. Up to 20.4kgs. A hell of a lot better than our 12kgs here!

* It is a convertible seat (so can be turned forward-facing) and can be used with the five point harness up to 36kgs. So really should last until the Monstar needs a booster.

 * Diono (back then known as Sunshine Kids) Publish their crash test results. Car seat manufacturers aren't required to do this. Even though being able to see the results is good, you can't really compare them with other seats so a bit hard to make a decision based on the results, but, I thought it showed the company had nothing to hide with their products.

 * I liked the fact it had a steel frame which also made it heaps heavier than the plastic ones here.

* The XTSL model has head wings, for some extra side impact protection.

* The seat can be tethered rear-facing. There aren't a lot of extended rear-facing seats that allow this. Any extra safety features are good in my book.   Wondering what a top tether is? Click here :)

* I also liked that Diono have a branch in New Zealand, just a bit closer to home than the US or Europe. (This proved very helpful later on.)

So now with the final decision made it's time to find the best price. International postage costs are pretty high, so it's a matter of finding the best combined price, seat+shipping. Then to find a supplier that will actually ship it here. Far out what a bloody nightmare that was! Some didn't do international shipping just because. Some didn't  because they said it was too expensive, um, pretty sure that's my issue yeah? Apparently not, pfft. Sadly I think some of the US stores didn't know where Australia was and answered with a puzzled "Where?? No, we don't ship there."  :/  hmmm...
I was almost ready to order from a NZ supplier, when I got lucky and found a US eBay store with a sale! Woohoo saved a couple of hundred dollars!  **Oh and yes it was a brand new seat in it's box with instruction book and all.

With the seat ordered, it's time to wait patiently for delivery. Well a little impatiently actually. I love getting parcels and after the epic process of finding the seat, I didn't want to wait too long. I think I almost thought it was too good to be true after finding such a good price. Maybe it was scam, it might not come at all. Or will it not be what was advertised?? Only slightly paranoid lol