ExerSaucer

A popular baby item when I was growing up was a baby walker. You sat the kid in a cloth seat suspended below a molded plastic frame, and the whole thing was mounted on a wheeled ring at the bottom. Baby's legs hung down near the floor, and when they could finally reach the ground baby could race like holy hell back and forth around the kitchen linoleum. It was pretty cool to us as kids. You could even put baby through a more challenging test by putting the walker on thick shag carpet. Talk about a leg workout!

But the folks at the Consumer Product Safety Division (I'm not sure what its a division of) decided that kids were having too much fun with these devices. Actually, they found that more children were being injured in baby walkers than with any other nursery product -- problems usually occurred when babies started upstairs in their walkers and ended up downstairs. So responsible companies began designing "activity centers" where baby could still sit and play, but couldn't travel around.

Kate tried out her new ExerSaucer this week. Kudos go to Devoted Wife's sister Courtney for laboring through the hours of assembly without having the instructions. It at least appears to have been put together correctly . . .

I have a new name for this device: the Overstimulator. Kate isn't quite sure what to do with everything on the Overstimulator. But she's gotten good at pushing the little "cell phone" around the tray until it meets resistance with something else and its buttons are depressed, launching recorded beeps, buzzes and a rather annoying person's voice saying "One . . . Two . . . Three . . . F-O-O-O-O-U-U-U-U-R!"

We understand that she should only be in this device for a few minutes at a time at her age, to allow her legs to develop normally. However, that seems to defeat the ultimate reason for buying this device in the first place, which is to have a place to stash your child while you do other things. But we dutifully limit her time in the Overstimulator to just a few minutes, or until she starts screaming at us (whichever comes first).

As you can see, she loves it. Next up: go-kart racing.