Food on the move (Safety 1st Fold-Up Booster Seat)

Name: jopassmore

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Product:	Safety 1st Fold-Up Booster Seat
Date:	16/10/01 (166 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: portable, light, brightly coloured

Disadvantages: none found

If you have ever tried eating out with a toddler or small child in a restaurant that does not have highchairs, you will understand the frustration that this causes...

First you try sitting the child on your knee. It is not long before the novelty of being in a new and exciting place wears off and they are grabbing at everything in sight. Knives and forks make great play things, or so they think. They wave them around aimlessly and then decide that combined with a tablemat and a less than gentle tap, they have created themselves a drum. By this stage people at nearby tables are staring at you as you try desperately to contain your child?s excitement. You put the child on the floor in an attempt to stop the racket and they run away as fast as their little legs will carry them. You swiftly follow them to find that they have befriended a little old lady and are attempting to charm some chips from her plate. After apologising profusely, you decide that outside would be a safer and much less disruptive place to be and so you pick the child up and head for the door, with them kicking and screaming. You pop back every few minutes in the hope that the food has arrived and when you find it has not, you swap babysitting shifts with your other half who swiftly carries the by now extremely hungry and irritated child back outside.

The food arrives after what seems like an age and you head back in to attempt to eat your dinner with the child on your knee. People tell me there is a technique to eating like this but I do not seem to have acquired it. I have tried on lots of occasions but either the food or the child ends up under the table and everybody within a few feet of us is splattered with food. I think when God was handing out maternal techniques, he certainly missed me out. Like the technique that some of my friends seem to have acquired to breastfeed their babies whilst carrying on with a relatively normal life, almost to the point of being abl
e to do their weekly shop with their baby suckling contentedly at their breast. I could hardly manage to get out of my seat to answer the phone whilst breastfeeding, let alone cater for and host a dinner party for 10 with a child attached to my breast, as one of my friends seems to be able to do!

Back to the point of this op. In the situation described above (the restaurant scenario not the breastfeeding one!), a 'safety first fold-up booster seat' is the ideal solution. It consists of a booster seat, which has a back section that folds down and side sections that fold inwards for portability. It also has a tray which folds within the body of the chair. It contains straps to attach it to a chair (any type of kitchen or dining room chair will do) and a further set of straps to attach the child to the chair. The tray simply slides into place and clicks into the body of the chair. It is brightly coloured (mine is red, green, blue and yellow), which kids love and when folded up is just slightly bigger than a briefcase and extremely light.

We bought one of these chairs when my daughter was a few months old and have not regretted it since. It comes everywhere with us. On holiday to Spain, to the grandparents, out for dinner etc. I have even started lending it out to friends who are going away. It is small enough to keep in the back of the car so that if you visit somewhere and find there is no highchair you can just fetch it from the car.

This chair spends a lot of time at Holly?s grandparent's house. When they agreed look after her whilst I worked, they expressly stated that they did not want their house cluttered up with baby things. I have still not managed to sneak a travel cot in and my poor daughter has to have her daily nap on a sofa surrounded by 3 or 4 dining room chairs! The fold-up high chair, on the other hand, has been welcomed by them with open arms. It spends evenings in the cupboard under their stairs a
nd is hauled out and assembled within minutes of Holly?s arrival.

We went on holiday with my parents to Spain and my father's first reaction to the chair was "we don't have to carry that thing around with us everywhere, do we?". When I showed him how light it was and that it would hang, by the straps, on the back of our lightweight pushchair, he was a little less perturbed by the idea of it. But by the end of the holiday he was also singing it's praises. It enabled us to spend at least 10 mins of each mealtime eating together without disturbance, before Holly decided she had had enough and wanted to explore.

We are now using this chair as a booster seat to allow my daughter (who is nearly 2) to eat at the table with us. We have taken the tray off and it pushes right under the table leaving her at the correct height to reach her food. It is also useful for when she is involved in craft activities at the table.

These chairs are not expensive. Mine cost £25 from the Tesco Direct catalogue, but I have seen similar versions for less in the Index catalogue. I expect you could pick up one of these second hand for a few pounds. Unfortunately we needed ours in a hurry for our holiday otherwise I would have hunted around for a second hand version. One of my friends uses a fold-up booster seat instead of a traditional highchair as she finds it takes up less room and can easily be put away when people come round for dinner.

So, in conclusion, if you are constantly on the move, you are lucky enough (or mad enough I should say) to enjoy regular meals out at posh restaurants with your kids, or you are simply looking for a cheap alternative to a highchair, get yourself one of these invaluable pieces of equipment. If it avoids one embarrassing situation, it is worth it in my book.

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