Another questionable piece of baby paraphernalia
Stuff for babies is a fast-growing and profitable market. Note how Babiesrus is one of the few big-box retailers to have survived the Wal-Mart and Target growth-fest, while its parent company Toysrus bit the dust. There’s a lot of stuff out there, and it all costs a lot of money. Some of it is good, some of it is mostly harmless, and some of it can make a poor, sleep-deprived parent feel even stupider. Buying needless baby junk is a nasty bit of business. Not only are you wasting time to shop, but also scarce money and finally, once you get the thing, even scarcer space.
We’re recently retired an item, and I’m feeling pretty strongly that we probably could have gotten along without it just fine. It’s his high chair. We’ve had to retire it because the straps have gotten too tight and because he can detach the tray himself and send it and all the food on it flying. As I was readying it for retirement, though, I became very aware of how hard it was to clean, and how many features it had (multiple heights, recline) that we’d never bothered to use.
Instead, we’ve moved our toddler Drake to a booster seat, which attaches to any regular chair. It is small, portable and easy to clean. Best of all, Drake cannot detach the tray himself.
The high chair was big, unwieldy, hard to clean and able to be defeated by toddler tricksiness. It cost about $60 and we only got about ten months of use out of it.
The booster seat is small, adaptable, can be taken to restaurants, and is still immune to Drake’s machinations. It cost about $25.
If I had it to do over again, I’d skip the high chair completely. They’ve over-supplied it with features and upped its price past the point of utility. The booster seat is the way to go.