Bargain booster! (Safety 1st Playsafe Swing Tray Booster Seat)

Member Name: ariom

Product:	Safety 1st Playsafe Swing Tray Booster Seat
Date:	25/04/09 (166 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cheap, no corners to hide food in, easy to clean, swing tray

Disadvantages: canny babies can slot their food underneath, fabric straps, only as stable as chair it's fitted on

We bought this seat from Boots online shop for £11.75 after our previous seat was too difficult to clean every meal. This seems very good value for a highchair. The seat came in several parts but was easy to clip together and also to fit to a chair. The seat needs the chair to have a high back as one clip goes underneath the chair and one round the back. These two straps are good enough to hold the booster very securely to the chair. This does not necessarily make the seat stable though, it's only as good as the chair it's strapped to, and most household chairs don't have the wide base a lot of highchairs do. My son went through a stage of trying to rock on the chair and managed to get the whole thing to move quite a bit, though it was a short phase and we just backed the chair against something to stop it tipping over. Also, this is a flaw of all boosters, not just this one.

The seat has 4 adjustable feet which can set it at 3 different heights, lifting the main booster away from the chair. These feet have friction pads which stop the booster sliding about on the chair surface. However, even on the tallest height, my 11 1/2 month old isn't at table height, and the gap between the booster and the chair is ideal for little ones to post their food through. If you do decide to invest in this booster, remove it regularly to see what's underneath!

The interior of the chair has a bump at the front which helps keep my son in place while I do up the straps. The whole of the interior is rounded, which means no corners and no hidden food, trust me, Bryn has tried! The plastic surface has always wiped down easily with minimal effort. There is a 3 point harness which is ample for the 6 month + age range the seat is designed for. My son can't undo the clips yet! However the straps are fabric, and need a soak every few days to keep them clean.

The tray is easy to operate with one hand, and though the swing tray was not part of my purchasing decision, I have really appreciated it with a wriggly son as it has meant I can always keep a hand on him when putting him in or out. The tray has two distance settings, but since we got this when my son was 7 months old we've not been able to use the tightest, and they do seem to hold the tray relatively close to baby. The tray is quite small compared to many non-booster chairs, but can fit onto it as much as my son would eat. The tray is claimed to be "dishwasher safe", but since this only applies to the rinse cycle (which I doubt many people would use as many times as their child eats), it's a pretty useless design feature. The tray does wipe clean easily though and has no corners to hide things in. It features a cup holder which disappointingly doesn't fit the popular Tommy Tippee first cup (our Doidy cup fits fine). My son seems to like this though to use as a corner to sort the food he doesn't want into.

Overall, the few faults are nothing considered to the value for money.

Summary: top value, easy to clean, meets almost all our highchair needs