Published on December 9th, 2010 | Materials: BJURSTA dining room table Description: We have a very small home and twin babies. Our small dining room/living room will not comfortably accommodate 2 high chairs and a dining room table. I heard about activity tables for daycare centers. They sell for $300+, which is not in our high chair budget. Other non-high chair options didn’t make feeding the babies at the same time sound easy. We wanted something similar to an activity table that would accommodate the babies now and the whole family at mealtime when the twins get older as well as serve as a place to make crafts or paint. I decided to make a modified activity table for a fraction of the price. ) and we had a free Ikea table a friend gave us. We traced the outline of the seats on the table and cut out holes using a jigsaw. We moved around the supports to make it stable since this is an expandable table (we lost the inner leaf so don’t plan to expand it ever).
The seats can be easily taken out and turned the opposite direction to make it easy for feeding infants, toddlers to eat dinner, or as an activity table for crafts. When we want to have adult friends over we remove the seats and place a board over the holes. We figure we can invest in a new table when the babies are bigger and can sit in regular seats. The table/chairs are good for kids up to 24+ months. Please visit our blog to see more pictures and a video demo of feeding 2 infants at once using this ingenious table! See more of the twin high chair.Before I get into the details of customizing high chairs (spoiler alert! I drew an octopus on it!), a few thoughts on the Antilop, in all its modern plastic affordability. There is not any high chair, no matter how expensive, that really gets me excited. I get excited about totally out of budget baby clothes. I could spend a fortune on baby carriers in various amazing fabrics. With my other kids, I had a chunky white wooden high chair that I’d picked up at a yard sale or something.
It was nice, and it served us well, but it’s long gone (no baby equipment survived the seven year gap in babies around here). So we needed something or other for Abe to sit in when he eats (which he’s not doing yet (I mean, aside from breastmilk) but will soon). I thought about just getting a booster seat with a tray to strap to one of our kitchen chairs. But I seem to recall having gone that route at some point with Gus and it making for a lot of food smooshed into our kitchen chairs.Basic, no frills, with unoffensive modern lines….and this thing is TWENTY DOLLARS (plus five more for the tray). You can’t go wrong, I figured. You also can draw all over it with a sharpie without too much pressure to make things perfect. Because, you know….it was $20. And it’s not going to be hanging out in your house for all that long anyway. I would love to give you a full review of the Antilop, but Abe’s not eating solids yet, so I can’t. He likes to sit in it for short periods of time before he starts crying and insisting you pick him up.
What I can tell you, though, is that the safety sticker affixed to the inside of your Antilop is so hard to get off it will make you wish you were never born. Or at least that you’d never bought an Antilop. Ikea, you know I love you, but, seriously: what the hell? Here is the label after I spent approximately 3 hours (or maybe 10 minutes) picking at it with my fingernail: At this point Dave said, “why don’t you just leave the label on there?” And I was like, “NO! (In fact, this is precisely what I did with the sticker on Abe’s Ikea crib. But it’s on the inside edge, where no one but Abe ever sees it. It doesn’t interfere with my attempts to photograph the nursery). So then I googled 359 different methods for removing stickers from plastic and tried them all. None of them worked particularly well by themselves, but by the time I’d done ALL of them, the sticker was gone. One site suggested a hair dryer to heat up the glue and loosen the sticker.
Dave complained a lot about doing this, for some reason: “this is SOOOOO boring.” Also, it didn’t work at all. Then there was the “put oil on it and let it soak for 24 hours” method. I couldn’t wait 24 hours, of course, because I’m not that kind of person. So I waited three minutes.So we finally found the one thing coconut oil doesn’t magically make better. Really, it worked a little, I guess? I went at with a scraper for awhile and made some progress. The Beagle was VERY interested in the high chair once it was coated with coconut oil, incidentally. Next I sprayed some Windex on it. I learned that Windex and coconut oil smell terrible together. OMG: this isn’t better!!! At this point, I was ready to return the $20 high chair to Ikea and spend a million dollars on a high chair if necessary, just to not have to deal with this goopy mess anymore.Next up: Goof Off wipes: These kind of, sort of worked, if I rubbed really, really hard. Finally, I read a tip on using WD40 to get rid of sticker residue:
Ignore the part where there’s an octopus. I haven’t gotten to that yet. Just admire the stickerless plastic (it’s kind of scratched all to hell from the scraper, but you can’t see that in the picture).Is plain white plastic any fun? No, it is not. It needs someone to come along and draw on it with a sharpie. A little while ago, Anu over at Nalle’s House put some Moomins on her high chair, and it looked ADORABLE (spoiler alert again: mine is not as adorable): Moomin High Chair at Nalle’s House So this was my inspiration. I considered a lot of different ideas. Maybe a pattern of some kind? But I’ve always been a little bummed about the lack of octopuses in Abe’s nursery, so I decided to go that route. I sketched out an octopus that I was pretty happy with and spent some frustrating time trying to cut out a stencil-like thing from it: Then I gave up. I was having a very hard time, and I was still going to have to figure out how to get those inside lines for the legs on there anyway…it wasn’t all outline.