Buyers beware of Chicco brand car seats!

When it came time for us to buy a carseat over 2 years ago.... JDub did a lot of research. He is soo good about that. He has the patience... and apparently time... to do that sort of thing. So when he came up and said he thought the Chicco brand travel system (a carseat, base, and stroller combined) was the best buy.. I said lets go for it! I even recommended it to friends. It had high safety ratings and good ratings from people in general. I really liked it too! I still notice other families have the same exact one when we're out and about and its 2 years old! So yea... you might have noticed how I said LIKED and not LIKE...... yea well while we were on the choir trip, which Baby came along on.... he developed this terrible rash on his little elbows! I couldn't figure out for the life of me what it was from. He was in the car seat alot b/c we were traveling alot.

TURNS OUT IT WAS THE CAR SEAT! Can you believe that? Little did we know Chicco brand carseats have been giving poor little babies rashes for a while now.... Apparently it is the fire-retardant part of the fabric... mixed with baby sweat... I dunno. But I felt soo bad. And well its not like you can just go somewhere w/o a carseat! So that was a bit of a bummer.. for a while there I ghetto-rigged a pillow case over top of the fabric, cut holes for the straps and buckles to keep his little arms from rubbing up on the fabric. And now we've purchased a cover from diapers.com... nomie brand. So far so good! The rash is soooo much better. His poor little elbows are a little dry still... but he just moves those arms around so much I dont think they've had time to heal all the way! Anyway. The cover is really nice. And it definately beat having to buy a whole new car seat! The only problem is now I'm not sure if we'll be able to use the stroller since its the same fabric... right now we can still click the car seat into the stroller and use it that way.. and well we can lay a blanket down too. But yea that totally sucks. So beware if you're in the market for a car seat...