Whispers and Shouts: High Chairs That Aren't Highchairs

Condo dining room idea: We have such a small dining room that having two highchairs in it would make it impossible to navigate or even enjoy a meal in. When the boys starting eating we had one of those plastic highchairs that attaches to a regular chair, and a narrow wooden highchair we put in a corner. It worked okay, but it did make things crowded. We always had the one chair tied up with the highchair on top and two spots with towels on the floor for catching the enormous amount of crumbs produced by two little people learning how to use utensils. It was gross. So Brian had this idea. I must admit I was skeptical. Out of foam that we originally were using on top of a short piece of furniture as a window seat, he made two throne-like seats that easily sit on top of the dining room chairs without being strapped on. They provide several advantages:

1) We have all four dining room chairs empty and available for anyone to sit on at any time.

2) We have no floor space covered in towels or blocked by high chair legs.

3) The boys also use the chairs in the living room when they watch their movies.

4) We are forced to keep our floor vacuumed more frequently because we don’t always keep the chairs in the same spot with towels underneath them.

Though that last one can be a pain, it is so much nicer overall. I mean, really. It’s not hard to wheel the vacuum out and vacuum our tiny dining room every couple days, and it looks SO much better than towels of dried bread chunks and petrified applesauce splotches under chairs.

Brian used spray-on adhesive to hold the sections of foam together after he had cut the foam into eight pieces—four rectangles for each chair. The truly amazing part of this whole project was that somehow Brian’s mom managed to sew together custom-fit covers for the chairs. The covers are two pieces and connect to each other and themselves with wide pieces of Velcro. We can take them off to wash them. The boys picked out their own fabric during a fleece sale at JoAnne Fabrics. I’m sure fleece is not the most practical fabric to use. Probably something that is easier to wipe off would work better, but the boys liked their soft fleeces and we liked the price.

Having the chairs has cleared up space and crumbs for us. The boys also enjoy standing up and slowly tipping them over backwards, which has only resulted in a few minor bumps and meltdowns.