These are a few of my favorite things... portable highchairs

I probably have more experience with this one than any of my other posts thus far. I don't usually buy more than one of something and use them both a lot, but my family lives in California and we go visit about twice a year. I can hardly handle packing clothes much less pack carseats, strollers, high chairs, diaper pails, etc. and babies need so much gear! So I ended up buying cheapo versions of stuff to keep there. And thus this post was born!

We take our little man everywhere with us, and even at home it is nice to have a strap to any chair kind of high chair that we can toss in the trunk and go.  He is so squirmy when he eats it darn near impossible to hold him while feeding, so this was a must for us.  We can take it to restaurants, grandma's, play dates, you get the idea.  And its nice to have at home, too, so we can have an extra seat when his little friends come and visit.

We have 2 travel high chair seats. One we use at home and was a little over $50. The other is in California and when I couldn't get one like we had at home off Craigslist (even though I tried for 3 days), I bought this cheaper version new for around $20-25.  The first I got on Amazon, and the second I got at Target, although both are available both places...

The first is the Fisher-Price Space Saver High Chair.

This high chair has a plush looking pad, a sturdy looking tray, a reclining seat, and a booster for when the child outgrows the high chair portion.  It does just what it says, and it looks fancy.  The reclining seat is kind of pointless to me, since I never really bottle fed, but maybe for some it would be useful.  It has shoulder straps, so once your kid is in this thing, they aren't falling out!  However, I feel like even in its most upright position it is reclined back too far, making for bad posture.  The tray is impossible to get on and off with one hand, which can be hard when wrangling a child.  It is a HUGE tray and while it is "dishwasher safe" the only way to get it to fit is to lay it flat across the bottom shelf.  No joke.  Also, it does not collapse at all.  If you want to take it with you, its the same size it always is, and while it fits in our trunk (we have a mid sized sedan) a smaller car would probably be out of luck, not to mention it takes up half the trunk space, then, which means the stroller wont fit...  Good thing we rarely use our stroller...  Needless to say, it has some issues with practicality.

Enter our "cheapo" version, the Fisher-Price Healthy Care Deluxe Booster Seat.

This doesn't have shoulder straps, a sexy looking pad, or a giant slide in tray.  After that, its all pros.  The tray snaps on with little pegs, meaning you can do one side, then the other = one handed.  It has a nifty little lift out tray on top of the tray that has a lid, so if you don't finish your cheerios, you can snap a lid on it and take it with without finding a new container for it all.  All three pieces (tray, food tray and lid) snap together pretty snug so they don't go flying apart.  But that's far from the coolest feature. It collapses.  The back folds down into the seat and the tray snaps on over it facing backwards to make this tiny little high chair cube.  And the strap you use to buckle it to the chair bottom can snap over the top of the tray to act like a handle.  Mind.  Blown.  Its like a parent actually used this one!  It also can be used as a booster seat, the seat bottom is adjustable in height and blah blah blah, but the compact portability is the huge selling feature here.  I would totally buy this one again.  I've considered ditching our expensive one to buy a second one of this for at home, but thus far I've felt too guilty about wasting the moolah.

So there you have it.  Cheaper can be better, folks!  Hope you can profit from my experimentation.