travel dining for toddlers
Next week, Spice and I are off to Malaysia! It's very exciting on the heels of our Montreal trip; empty suitcases, wash everything and repack again. :-)
One thing I've been juggling around is the efficient feeding of a toddler on vacation. Spice loves to sit at the table and eat with us, but I don't want to rely on restaurants there having high chairs, and we tend to eat at local hawkers (vendors) anyway. The seating arrangements are usually plastic patio chairs, or something similar. I don't really want to lug a laptop-sized booster seat around with me, so I've been looking for slimmer solutions that travel well.
What I've settled on is the nifty Kaboost + a chair sling. I'll let you know how it works out, but in the meantime, here's the 411.
The Kaboost is a cute, portable, folding chair lift. It unfolds and locks on to any four-legged chair to raise it up for toddlers to table-height. The cross section is offset from each of the four ends, so that the height is adjustable depending on which side is up. It's meant to be an easy fast way to raise a chair, typically for toddlers that don't want to sit in a high chair or booster seat, but could use the extra height.
A travel chair sling is a bit of fabric or such that attaches to the back of a regular chair and provides a sling-like pouch to keep your older baby or young toddler from sliding out or falling off of the chair. Some have harnesses, others fit a variety of chairs, but all are meant to be slim, portable and easy to use. There's a bunch of different kinds on the market, but the ones I liked were the Snazzy Baby and the My Little Seat, and some I found on Etsy.
The one downside I'm concerned with is that if the chair doesn't pull up all the way to the table, Spice might end up using the chair seat as a impromptu surface to mash her food on. Hmm. Maybe I could just stick an old receiving blanket under her first in that case.
