Paying $15 For A Highchair Temporarily Made Me Feel Like A Bad Mom

antilopI’ve been going through a cycle of furniture and toy buying for my son, who is now five months old. Once I identify that he needs something, I do a bunch of OCD research and find one really expensive item that I decide to splurge on. Then I wait too long to purchase it and end up either skipping the purchase entirely (hello awesome, modern Glider/nursing chair for $900) or buying a non-child version that works just fine.

This happened with his baby bathtub, where I researched 5 million options that would work in our kitchen sink (because I live in an NYC apartment that has a tub that perfectly doesn’t work for the one usage where we actually would want to have a tub). I finally found the perfect adorable, simple and aesthetically pleasing one, but when I went to Bed Bath And Beyond, the tub ninja, or tub genius or whatever they’re called there, told me it wouldn’t work in my sink. Dejected, I went back to the Google and ended up buying a $12 rubber tub that is made for feeding horses.

Seriously, it is called a Tub Trug  and it arrived in a box that said HorseLoverz on it and my husband made fun of me for a month for washing our baby in a feeding tub.

But, it works! And it cost $12. And I was proud of the purchase.

So when I started looking for highchairs, I did my monthly Google dance, where I search for ALL the items that exist in the world for a situation and looked at that pretty Stokke high chair and tried to figure out if it would fit in my teeny apartment. And then I glanced at Ikea and scoffed in the general direction of their high chairs. HA. What kind of parent buys their kid a deathtrap from Ikea for $25?

Except… a lot of parents do? This mom is super excited about it.

And when I went on Apartment Therapy to see what all the expensive moms were doing about high chairs, all sorts of commenters were talking about how much they LOVE the Antilop chair. Meanwhile, once I mentioned this chair to other moms I know, I got TONS of positive responses about it.
OK, great! I was getting a cheap chair that weirdly even looks like the child’s version of my kitchen chairs.

Except when I went to Ikea, it was on sale, for $15. For a minute, I got nervous that I am actually a bad mom and that the thing would disintegrate once in my home. A friend on Twitter suggested that it is actually made of kindling, hence the price.

If it is intended to be kindling, I’m hoping that because it’s from Ikea, it won’t actually function to start a fire.

Because so far, it’s been amazing. It’s compact and easy to wipe down. And, confusingly given it’s place of origin, it was EASY TO PUT TOGETHER. And take apart. I could stow it away easily if I so wished.

Honestly, this little chair is perhaps the one piece of Ikea equipment that was gifted from the gods.

Oh, and PS: I put my son in the chair last night to try his first solids and he LOVED the thing. He got so excited to sit in it and chomp on food that doesn’t come in a bottle, it was crazy. He loved it so much that my husband got super motivated and made this video about the whole experience.
[youtube_iframe id=”xJzP28PS9Zs”]

 

Granted, we’ve owned this chair for two days, which leaves plenty of time for it to collapse with my son inside of it and make me an idiot for writing this post. But for my own sanity, let’s pretend like that’s not going to happen.

I honestly felt like a bad mom for only spending $15 on a chair that my son may be using for the next two years. Buy Buy Baby, you win!

(Image:Youtube)

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