You have to be cruel to be kind... the ‘Trap-A-Snack’

A few weeks ago Isaac started to show a real interest in feeding himself; he usually has a spoon of some description to hold while eating (Mister Spoony is always a welcome dinner guest at our table!) and has started trying to jab it either in the bowl I’m feeding him from, in my mouth (yumyum), or in his own mouth. Isaac also gets through lots of finger foods (mainly because he likes to swipe everything off the highchair onto the floor – our floor has usually seen better days when it comes to hygiene so those snacks then go in the bin).

 With this in mind we decided to invest in Vital Baby’s Unbelievabowl. There are a few of these types of ‘stick to anything’ bowls around but having had Vital Baby products before I knew they’d be fab. So off we trotted to John Lewis (“honest Ben, it’s really the closest place to go to get them, and I NEED to see them in ‘real-life’ before I buy them...”), and purchased said bowls. Unfortunately for us, after we’d got home, opened all the packaging and heated Isaac some lunch in one we discovered that the Unbelievabowl didn’t stick to Isaac’s highchair. Don’t get me wrong, the ‘stickability’ of the Unbelievabowl is errrmm unbelievable; we had great fun sticking it to windows, worksurfaces, cats (just kidding), even the bath tub... but the tray of the highchair... no. Turns out the particular finish of our highchair’s tray let’s air sneak under the seal and Isaac can pretty much pull it off before 30 seconds are up. Annoyingly, it worked perfectly on anything else, including my chum’s babies highchair, and none of us could get it off the window no matter how hard we tried!

Anyway, the long and the short of it is I thought I’d let vital baby know about the fact it didn’t stick just in case there was a special button to press when you use it on a highchair (i know that sounds completely implausible but I AM pregnant with serious baby brain so I thought I’d best check!). Lucky for me the service and people at Vital Baby turned out to be lovely, they were really helpful and understanding and suggested some great alternatives. In the end they very kindly replaced the bowls with one of their newest products the ‘Trap-A-Snack’.

The Trap-A-Snack (in case you can’t imagine!) is a little bowl with a handle that has a sort of perforated lid on it, so little ones can poke their hands in and grab a snack but if they drop the bowl or (as Isaac likes to do) throw it around the room, the snacks stay in and the dirt from my kitchen floor stays out! Fantastic idea eh? Right, well we’ve had the trap-a-snack a few weeks now and although its great Isaac seems to have a mental block with it, he is only 11 months but still... how hard is it to poke your fingers in a hole and pull something out? He does this ALL the time with things he shouldn’t... the wet wipes, the storage baskets in the bathroom, the bin ... but for some reason he’s been a little slow grasping the trap-a-snack concept. I’ll tell you what though, for a busy mummy its worth its weight in gold for this reason alone, as he will spend agggeesss trying to poke his hand in and get something out without getting the trap-a-snack stuck on his hand. It’s also very entertaining to watch him trying to work it out, you can really see the cogs turning - I know, I’m one mean mommy right?I reckon sometimes as a mommy you have to be cruel to be kind though and I’m sure it’s doing wonders for his mental agility...honest! I think the problem lies in the fact getting snacks out is a two handed operation, one is needed to hold the pot and one is needed to get the food out; for Isaac this would involve putting Mister Spoony down for a little while - which doesn’t really seem to be an option at the moment!