We started shopping for the Murphy bed in catalogues and retail stores and realized right quick we were outpriced out of the gate. They range from $3,000 to $10,000, and our budget was $800 to $2000 at the very top end. My main requirements were: 1) Opens; 2) Closes; 3) Won’t fall. So $10k seemed a bit pricey.

(A friend of ours, the terrific architect Paul Baird, designed this mama for a client. I won’t say the exact price, but it was roughly 20 times our budget. But it’s a Murphy bed that’s actually a ROOM. Like a WHOLE ROOM.)

Our friend Kristen, of SF Space Angels, gave us a few names for contractors. One of them, of Squidbuild, answered us, and gave us an extraordinarily reasonable quote. We were a little worried, quality-wise, but figured that the construction is actually pretty straightforward, and the main reason for hiring someone was so that David wouldn’t have to spend three days swearing and paining his back.

So Sunday morning, we cleared the mattress into the hallway.

Like a stage in our own home!

Then we cleared out all the stuff under our bed–no easy feat, since we built a bed specifically for the extra storage. And David took apart the bed. What do you do with two sheets of plywood in a small apartment, by the by?

She does love her toolset.

Then we remembered what the room looked like before we moved in.

Is that... space?

Then Aaron arrived, and we went to SFMoMA and enjoyed their excellent Sunday family programs. We watched Harold and the Purple Crayon on a big screen whilst laying on beanbag chairs, played peekabo in the sculpture garden, and only weathered a few serious toddler cloudbursts.

At 5 PM, we arrived home, exhausted. David helped Aaron load the mattress onto the bed–apparently without sixty pounds of mattress, the hydraulic hardware doesn’t really stay open–and I vacuumed. And vacuumed. And also dusted. Tip: if someone’s coming to your house to do installation work, and he says he’s doing all the cutting before arrival, make sure to cover everything within a breeze’s distance, anyway. Otherwise you’ll likely be picking sawdust out of your kid’s felt sandwich bread for several days.

Once we were cleaned up, locked and loaded, though, we had this:

The straps keep the bedclothes from sliding.

And with a bit of a heave and only a tiny bit of ho, we pushed the bed into its box, locked the legs back, and had this.

Like a big cabinet that sleeps two.

See all that stuff in front of it? That’s a rug. And also floor space. Loads of floor space smack in the middle of our most heavily-traversed room. Eliza roamed around like a pony newly loosed into a meadow. David and I couldn’t quite compute that after several years of discussing it, we finally did it: we got a Murphy bed.

Opening and closing it is no more difficult than making the bed. The only real difference, sleep-wise, is that my head is under the box part, so I don’t have direct access to my alarm clock. I’ve had to move a small end table over to my side of the bed for nighttime, a temporary solution that will soon be remedied. We also need to do something about the Elfa drawers and wall unit–likely a full-size curtain instead of a piece of fabric hanging limply. And I want to paint the bed the same color as the wall so it blends in.

But lookit that, wouldja? Our bedroom is a sunroom again. Except at night, when it’s not.

P.S. If you’re interested in DIY, here’s the kit he used for the Murphy bed mechanism. It’s called Create-a-Bed and sells for only $299. And by Aaron’s account, the instructions are excellent.

A lovely sofa (that reclines!) and a nice shelf, to boot.

Pretty, yes? A nice loveseat-sized sofa, a handy shelf for your vase or clock or whatever you like. But if you feed this bed after midnight…

Cue Transformer sound effects!

…it transforms into a mother-loving queen-sized bed. WITH THE SHELF STILL INTACT as the bed’s front legs.

Ingenious.

I emailed Resource Furniture, guessing that this little beauty would be way out of our price range. My guess was at least $8,000, and David guessed more in the $10k range. To my delight, I received an email from Ron Barth, one of the company’s founders, within 24 hours:

In general, these Space saving products are really unique and exceptional quality.

They all come with a lifetime warranty on the mechanism and 15 year warranty on our mattresses.

They are the slimmest wall beds ever made and the ITO is so well designed and engineered that it need not be attached to the walls or the floor and operates independently of other support.  It is completely self-contained and stable unsupported…

Lifetime warranty and a 15-year warranty on the mattress, which is sold separately. That’s what I call service. You have multiple options for fabric and wood, of course, and each option increases the price a bit; the base price for this unit is $10,500. RocketMan’s right on target: it’s no small investment.

Ron did, however, include recommendations for a few of their other products: The Penelope, Ulisse, Adam, and Circe series cost half that, with the most basic system (the Ulisse) priced at $3,250. Alas, that’s still a bit rich for our renters’ blood, although we’re in complete agreement: if we owned our current apartment, we’d jump on these systems in a heartbeat. For now, though, we’re going to get back in touch with Kristen, our friend at Space Angels, and see if we can’t get a regular ol’ Murphy bed in the $800-$1000 range.

If you’re into transforming furniture–the kind that wage battle to destroy the evil forces of small spaces–you must check out Resource Furniture’s website. (Especially this page.) And let me know if you order anything!

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This is the story of a street treat: Boy finds chair. Boy brings home chair. Chair’s provenance is Bank of America, circa 1986ish; it’s Danish; it’s got rubber straps that have long dried out. It has a cushion possibly filled with sawdust. It’s also got sleek lines and wood in excellent condition.

First step: replace the rubber straps. Someday we’ll pay to have someone do it up right, but in the meantime, take a gander at this spit-n-twigs job:

Anyone got any masking tape?

Step two: Replace the sawdusty innards with something less gross. We keep the original cushion cover, but it’s not big enough to offer much in the way of padding. We toss an Urban Outfitters floor pillow on the seat as a cushion.

Step three: Order a custom cushion from FoamOrder.com for a grand total of $35ish. They’re selling covers for upwards of $70 a pop, so we figure we can keep using the Urban Outfitters cover until get someone we know to make one, or find a cheaper place, or something.

Or not.

Fast forward 18 months to my hobbit-costume frenzy and Fabric Outlet. I find an upholstery fabric remnant that seems to match; I measure three times and cut once; I sew carefully along lines drawn on the fabric; I hem and haw about how I’ll close the fabric in the back, and what if it’s too big? What if the cushion cover isn’t nice and snug, and is all baggy?

After a good ten minutes of sweating, and assistance from the man of the house, we are in agreement: all baggy is not the problem. “Barely fits” is more to the point. As for how to close it, my idea of sewing it shut will take some seriously strong thread. At the moment, we’re hiding the gaping maw in the back with throw pillows (and the original cushion cover pillow):

Now about those straps...

It’s all slope and squished in there, and the underside is stretched tight as a drum. Like, an actual drum with hollow space underneath. Maybe it’ll stretch, like leather?

One moment of happiness, true sewing luck. Here’s the thread just as I finished the last stitch.

Sometimes, things DO work out, even if in the end they kind of don’t. Viva la crafty business.

Remember that wild hair I mentioned about a month ago? Stash the DVDs, stash the books, make ourselves a two-bedroom? We actually did it. All three. On a trial basis, anyway.

After much discussion re the Murphy bed and the floor plans and all manner of hemming and hawing, I managed to convince RocketMan that the first step on the path to twobedroomosity would be to move our bed into the sunroom; at the very least, we could decide if we actually liked the setup. If, after a few months, it works for us, then we can invest the cash it’ll take to install a Murphy bed. His thought was that we just move in the mattress; I nixed the idea on the grounds that without a lamp, alarm clock, book, and the comforts of the bedroom, we wouldn’t really  be giving the sunroom a fair shake. So yesterday, around 3:30–right after we put RocketBaby down for her afternoon nap–we began the process of migrating books, tchotchkes, and a big-ass credenza we bought at Goodwill for $22 a few years back. Here’s the before:

There are a FEW empty shelves, right?

Once we got going, of course, the problems stacked up. The spines of the bookshelves are ON the credenza, for instance, so that took some delicate maneuvering. The credenza had to be half-emptied before we could budge it; the floor letters had to be moved; the shelves stashed; and everything done as mouse-quiet as possible, so as to extend naptime.

Within 90 minutes–still within naptime, good baby!–we’d made this progress:

Step 1: Purge the books.

Step 2: Move the credenza.

Step 3: Remove the shelf spines.

At this point, we faced the really big job: moving the bed. Moving the bed represented the point of no return. We move the bed, we move the bedroom. We can move it back (anytime! Really!) but you get the idea: we’re really doing this thing.

And then she woke up, of course. Which made moving the mattress and the bed extra-fun, and included one short stint in which she had to be jailed back in the crib, which made her supremely unhappy. But with the sun setting and lamb ragu perking on the stove, we managed to set most of the new bedroom to rights. To my surprise, the bed was less visually invasive than I thought it would be (I’m guessing because the wall behind it is a blank) but its addition has enhanced the sense of visual clutter with other objects in the room. (I suddenly want to empty all but, say, three shelves.)

Here’s the view from the couch. It’s full dark outside at this point.

Step 4: Take over the world.

Of course, the bedroom is currently in an attic-state of disarray. Remember that we’d made the bed so we could have additional storage underneath, and we didn’t move any of those items into the sunroom; everything from a jigsaw to my hatbox of wedding memorabilia is littering the floor. We’re waiting on moving RocketBaby into the bedroom–partially because we want to give ourselves some time in the new space, and partially because we just don’t have the energy for it after yesterday’s whirlwind. We hung a comforter between the living room and new bedroom to block some of the TV noise, and someday that’ll be replaced by doors. So there’s more work to be done.

And how did the first night go? Not well. I blame it on Hotel Syndrome; it usually takes at least three days to get accustomed to sleeping in a strange place. This morning, nothing but a curtain blocked the murmuring from the nursery, and once she was up and about, it took all of an hour for her to figure out that behind the comforter lay a sleeping mommy, which pretty well guaranteed that she’ll never be tricked by it again. But we’re giving it time. On the upside, we suddenly have an extra room. Whatever shall we do with all that space?

Fortunately, we did make some headway last weekend: RocketMan and a friend of ours, Scott of www.planetscott.com, headed down to California Mini-Storage and finally trucked all the boxes out of our apartment. We are now minus two chairs, ten boxes of books, several boxes of empty DVD cases, and two boxes of outgrown baby clothes.

And, no. I have no pictures of our blissfully spacious apartment. Why? Because it feels like we didn’t get rid of a thing. I think this must be what happens when your stuff begins to outpace you, yes? Getting an 8x8x8 storage space–essentially expanding our apartment by an entire room–just redistributes some stuff, frees up a little visual clutter, but doesn’t give that wonderful sense of cleared chi. I said before we lost a battle; we might be losing the war. That said, we did add another room to our living space for only an additional $60 a month–not bad by San Francisco standards.

All that said, we’re bringing in reinforcements. I mentioned in the last blog that we called our friend Kristin Murtagh, a designer with “SF Space Angels, whose self-proclaimed goal is to “design spaces that are both beautiful and functional. We specialize in the design of custom storage and work areas in small urban spaces.”

Sounds good to me. Plus I love the name. Makes me think of astronauts with halos instead of helmets.

We’ve often scoffed at the magazines and books featuring small spaces that also happen to be owned by architects. Well, sure, we think. When you can knock down walls and have your own T-square, why NOT move into 600 SF and make it a supercool, super-efficient super-apartment? The goal of this blog has always been to show how we trick out our rented apartment–in other words, walls stay intact. (Doors are optional.) But since we decided not to leave our apartment until we absolutely cannot stand to stay here one more second, we decided we’d have to put even more energy into it–as long as the energy is portable and affordable.

So we’re thinking of finally moving into the sunroom. And maybe getting a Murphy bed. And best thing? Kristin came and took some measurements, checked out our sunroom, and sent us some plans as part of her free consultation. She’s also looking into Murphy bed prices. At this point, it’s more likely we’ll move our bed into the sunroom for a month or so before deciding to go the Murphy bed route–it won’t cost less than $800, and we have to know it’s stable without getting bolted to the wall (not to mention movable for when/if we leave this place).

But check out the plans she made! It makes our space look pretty sweet, I have to say. And if we go with this version, I’m typing this where I’ll be sleeping in the future. She even made room for a chair and a plant in the corner. Isn’t that thoughtful?

The first scale model you've seen of the place.

In early July, the AIDSWalk committee  convinced a few furniture dealers to donate four chairs for a fundraising raffle. Mind you, I work at a major international interiors and architecture firm, so we’re not talking a nice armchair for the den–we’re talking two tricked-out office chairs and a set of supercool lounge chairs. I bought six tickets and dropped them all in the lounge chair raffle; RocketMan instantly asked what we’d do with them if we won, but, really what were the chances?

A week later, our sun room looked like this:

Set phasers to stun.

Within an instant, we became the incredibly geeked owners of two Phillipe Starck-designed Kartell Eros chairs, retail between $400-$600 each, depending on which website you visit. They’re the coolest chairs I’ve ever owned, and I love me some chairs (this is one of my favorite coffee-table books: 1000 Chairs).

Before you keep reading, mind: I am NOT ungrateful. When my name was picked from the hat, they probably heard the squealing in Sacramento. The chairs are all shiny and sci-fi, and the swivel is as smooth as the molded plastic of the seat. RocketBaby spent several evenings being spun into delirium. On the downside, though–they take up about 16 square feet of floor space. We don’t really have an appropriate place for more sitting chairs. And, as RocketMan pointed out, they don’t exactly fit in our honey-wood cottage aesthetic, such as it is.

But Kartell Eros! I feel like they’re HEIRLOOM chairs, that forty years from now RocketBaby will be begging me to have just one for her new lunar module. I’m loathe to let them go, especially since, for all intents and purposes, they cost $25 each, and that means the universe personally gifted us with them. So we started looking at maybe getting a bigger storage space: one that could ostensibly serve as the fifth room of our apartment, as opposed to just an extra closet.

Then there was the vacation. Visiting actual houses with actual backyards and real-and-true laundry machines, and doors that close, and playing loud music without disturbing the baby–all of these things spoiled us for our return to San Francisco. I love our apartment, but suddenly the curtain in the hallway nursery seems like an awful inconvenience. I started poking around online for two-bedroom apartments. RocketMan began fantasizing about doing laundry three times a week. And a few nights ago, we had a serious discussion about whether more space would make us happier.

By the end of the conversation–which crossed the line into argument once or twice–I came to three conclusions: 1) having a door on the baby’s bedroom (one that is not made of plywood) would definitely make our lives easier, if not happier; 2) I really, really don’t want to spend half again as much money on a bigger place right now, especially when our current rent-controlled place meets most of our needs adequately; and 3) even if we find a two-bedroom, it could still be the same size as our current place, so why move at all?

So our solution (temporary though it might be): Push this apartment as far as it’ll go. We’ve done a lot with it, but we can do more. And if we hate what we end up doing, well, there’s the nuclear option of hitting the rental listings. My plan for Exceed Apartmental Expectations is as follows:

1) Get the bigger storage space. Paying an extra $60 a month is a lot less than $600, and we’ll have room for some of the changes listed below.

2) Pack up the books. We have at least 80 feet worth of shelving for books, most of which we don’t read on a regular basis. Pare down the books to two shelves, ship the rest to the storage space, when we get a place with a library, we can break them back out again.

3) Pack up the DVDs. We have most of our DVDs in binders, but three shelves’ worth of our favorites. We don’t need them to be visible anymore. Four shelves down to one.

4) Here’s the biggun: move the baby into the bedroom, and the bed into the sunroom. Here’s our current layout:

You might remember from awhile back, when I said the reason we didn’t want the nursery in the sunroom was because we wanted that extra space and privacy for us, and that’s true. But our needs have changed, and so we’re seriously thinking about making the leap to full two-bedroom status. If we move her into the bedroom, she’ll have a quiet space and a door. Moving our bed into the sunroom might be weird for guests, but as it is, we’re hardly inviting anyone over at night because her nursery is so close to the living room. We’ll have to move the computer somewhere–or get that laptop we’ve been talking about–and it’s likely we’ll have to keep our clothes in the bedroom. But having that extra aural privacy for her (and thus us in the evenings) could go a long, long way in making us less like slaves to rent control, and more like adults with a two-bedroom apartment.

We’ll see what happens on days like today, when RocketMan’s sleeping in late. But this all drives home my favorite part of renting: nothing’s ever permanent.

“What’s that?”

“I found it in the garbage room.”

“Oh. What’s it for?”

“I don’t know. It’s a good piece of wood, though.”

“OK.”

At that point, he had two chairs that he’d picked up off the street, so I knew he had a knack for street treats; this was the first in a long line of trash treats, though, and it was merely a potential treat at that. A few months later, he propped said plank of wood on four4x4s and called it a coffee table. When I say propped, I mean propped; the wood lay balanced on the four posts, and a sneeze in the wrong direction would send the whole pile careening to the floor with a not-unloud thump. But he was trying it out, you see. The wood plank was auditioning.

After much cajoling on the parts of me and his friends, he finally granted the wood plank the role, and I came home one day (this was after I’d moved in) to find he’d taken the Gordian knot approach to building: get some big-ass bolts and just drill right through the sucker. The finished product looked like this:

See the bolts? I think he just got tired of trying to decide what to do and did anything, something for which I’m very proud. Sometimes you just gotta decide to decide and deal with the consequences. In the case of the coffee table, it did us very well for several years. No, the wood was not a high-polish beauty, but she was sturdy, and she worked–and even though you see coasters in that picture, free wood from the trash room doesn’t really garner a sense of “CAREFUL!” in the owner; we try to keep her free of coffee rings, but if it happens, it happens.

Fast forward a few years, and we began to realize a few things about the coffee table: First, it was a shin-banger. For me, anyway. I tend to cut corners from time to time (read: every day, always), and the corners on this beast were brutal. Secondly, it was a beast. Like HUGE for our room. So about two years ago, he got out the table saw and took off about three inches from the right side, rounded the corners, and attached pipes as legs. For a year or so the coffee table lived as a mule, a mutant with two steel legs and two wooden, with one square side and one round. Alas, we have no photographs of that stage, so you’ll have to believe me that the mutant had her own special charm.

Finally, last year, with RocketBaby in utero and our apartment feeling smaller by the day, RocketMan finished the genetic experiment and fully transformed the beast into a beauty. (OK, a slightly more elegant beast.) Out went the last of the 4x4s; out went the last sharp corners; in came more pipes.

We're such grownups now. We have a couch! And burp cloths!

If this looks familiar, it is: he used the same method for building our bed last year.

No more sharp corners; slightly downsized; still stable as ever; and it’s light enough now that we can slide it to the side during the day to maximize play space. We have plans to  install some bins underneath to store toys. And best of all, with the Agent of Chaos roaming around, new set of teeth at the ready, we have few worries about her destroying our beautiful coffee table. Worst case scenario? We’ll have to buy the next plank of wood to make a new one.

But sometimes, one has to chuck form out the window settle on pure function. Such as it is with babyproofing. I imagine it’s the same even in a big home, but in a small apartment, there’s no room to corral the kid once she’s mobile, and it becomes a constant game of trying to stay a step ahead. I’m reminded of the scene in Jurassic Park in which Robert Muldoon, Human Action Figure, tells about how the velociraptors have been attacking the fences to test their integrity. “They remember.”

That’s her. She remembers. When she’s looking at you, she’s figuring things out. How can I open this drawerful of batteries and swallow one whole? How can I dismantle the printer-copier? How can I open and close this door until my fingers get squished? And most important, How can I get into the kitchen? So here we are, left alone in the raptor paddock, trying to get all the systems back online before she figures it out. It needs to be fast, and it’s often not pretty. You’ve seen the movie. One false move and you end up stuffed in a locker, missing an arm.

Of course, all the solutions below are temporary, which is to say, we’ll keep them until we figure out a more attractive way to keep her from injuring herself. Parents have two options: babyproof ahead of time and raise the kid in a padded cell, or manage the danger spots as they become apparent. We’ve chosen the latter; here are the results. (I’ll update when we come up with our Pricier, Better, More Attractive Solutions.)

Tie It Down

Remember the accordion door to the nursery? Lovely item, but as I suspected, it’s irresistible to her current open-and-close habit. Same goes for the credenza drawers. In the former case, a couple of hooks and a bungee cord keep the door immobilized. In the latter case, a long string fastened with a little push-catch (the kind on hoodie strings) keeps the drawers closed and easily reopened. When it came to the credenza doors, we just moved half of the photo albums and filled it with her toys. Gotta let the kid have some fun.

The ol' bungee-cord-strapping-down-the-accordion-door trick.

If you can't beat 'em, put some toys in it.

She can almost get her fingers pinched, but at least she can't take out the chokables hidden inside.

MacGyver a Pegboard

Yup, the pegboard’s back–it’s not just for kitchens and tool sheds. (Especially if you happen to have three or four pegboards stacked in a closet.) In this case, we have pegboards, hook screws and that ol’ favorite, the twisty tie. The printer was the first thing we babyproofed, by the by–it started on the bottom shelf, then moved up, then was covered by a piece of wood slid in front, and when she got around that, we went with the pegboard solution. As you can see, she’s clever enough to know how to work it, but she doesn’t have the strength or balance to get under it to the goods. Yet.

Here’s the printer pegboard:

Damn you, reflective surface in which she can see her face!

And at the base of our bar, where we keep our glass jars:

Use a… deli container?

So we know the curse of the pre-war apartment is the Curse of One Outlet Per Room, but corollary to that curse is “All electrical workings shall live OUTSIDE THE WALL!” That means several things: 1) We have wires everywhere; 2) The few outlets we do have are loaded with heavy-duty power-strip plugs; and 3) The outlets and power cords stick out at least four inches from the wall, making them both grabbable and even an excellent boosting mechanism. On top of, of course, gnawable.

I came home one day from work to find this ingenious, awful-looking contraption:

"Deli Container With Outlet" -- ca. 2010

I can’t be entirely sure, but I think that had fruit salad in it the day before. The weird thing is, it works. The plastic makes a nice noise but it’s too much of a bother to get around (for now). By the by, if anyone has connections on a giant, box-shaped outlet cover that hinges up and allows us to get at the plugs underneath, let me know.

The Classic Gate

No babyproofed home would be complete without the wooden baby gate. We have one in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. She really, really dislikes them both.

First you put me in a clown suit. Now you won't let me dig through the recycling?

Most babyproofing, we’ve found, is more a matter of habit: don’t leave the coffee mug on the coffee table. Don’t leave the bedroom door open (unless refolding your clothes is a favorite pasttime). Develop an eye for chokables–the current standard is to put it in a film canister, which makes me wonder: 30 years from now, how will Eliza test what’s chokable? Oh, right. App.

I knew from the start we’d need to add a safety belt, a hunch confirmed by the first few weeks’ worth of use: the Agent of Chaos found that she could turn herself completely around in the chair, and if she did manage to keep both of her fat little legs under the tray, it only took a bit of squirming to start the inevitable scooch-to-fall event that would confirm that buying a vintage high chair was a terrible idea. It was beginning to seem as though we’d need to invest in a new high chair.

She's annoyed she can't pick at the cover anymore. Doesn't she look furious?

Enter RocketMan and His ToolKit Of Tricks, and me with my twice-yearly urge to be mildly crafty, and Deceptachair got a makeover. First up: a safety strap. RM never takes pictures while he’s working (WTF, I keep saying; doesn’t he know the blogosphere NEEDS him?), so I’ll do my best to describe the process:

• Get clear plastic tubing, the kind that college kids use in beer bongs. Slit it lengthwise.
• Insert a light dog chain.
• Screw in a loop hook under the tray.
• Hook it in place.
• Realize it looks like you’re strapping your daughter in with a chain, and cover it all up in red decorative tape.
• Cross “Will you PLEASE make a safety chain so she doesn’t kill herself? Like, today? PLEASE?” off the whiteboard.

Yes, we have a whiteboard. If I could marry a whiteboard, RocketMan would have some competition.

Enter me, Queen of the Craft Fail. I’m not getting into all the swearing and futzing and muttered “I HATE yous” that went into the faux-upholstery; all you need to know is, I had some leftover contact paper, scissors, and an exacto knife. And now we have a newly covered Deceptachair, clean and fresh, and if we ever want to show the world its gray faux-flannel underthings, I’m pretty sure some Goo Gone will tear away all my work in no time at all.

Our options are endless: there’s the Jumperoo; the Johnny Jump-Up (which I keep wanting to call the Johnny Walker); the Exersaucer and all its spinoffs. Months back the RocketMan and I purchased the Deceptachair, but she hasn’t grown into the walker part of it just yet, so we needed some kind of stationary, stable play area that would exercise her sausagey legs and keep her hands and eyes busy.

Problem is, small apartment. Smaller nursery. Weirdly wide doorjambs, so the Johnny Jump-Up doesn’t clamp on our widest doorway. And the Exersaucer is roughly the size of our dining room table. So I took a chance and googled “portable exersaucer,” and somehow landed on this terrible website (really, folks, try some cross-browser CSS programming) selling one of these no-brainer inventions that’s made at least five people I know say, “Man, why didn’t I invent that?”

Here, I present to you: The Pop-a-Tot, which proves that small apartment dwellers can, when in need, take their cues from the people who know from small spaces: campers and sailors.

It’s like an Exersaucer, in that she sits in it and can bounce, and it has cupholders for sippy cups, and loops for attaching toys. Its superpower? It collapses like a camping chair. Into a bag you can sling over your bloody shoulder! We can take it with us to our friend’s house! We can collapse it and stuff it in the corner! We can hide it under the bed! We can take it to the park!

Sure, her legs are too short to reach the fabric, so we have to slide a big pillow underneath it. Sure, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the Evenflo Farmyard Exersaucer Mega. But she’s pleased as punch to sit in it for up to 20 minutes at a time (30 if we’re playing peekaboo). According to the website, it’s been tested six ways to Sunday, so safety isn’t a concern; I worried that she’d pinch her fingers in the crossbars, but straps on the front keep the whole thing pretty damn unfoldable when it’s expanded. All for the bargain price of $49.99.

I do take issue with the colors available on the site—we bought “Primary Colors” (since when is purple a primary color?), and the other fashionable choices are Pink Leopard, Camo with Green Trim, and Camo with Brown Trim; if I’m camping in the woods, I don’t think I’d want to put my baby in a camo carrier, but that’s just me. And like I said, the site needs some serious improvement if they want their business model to take off. But they do have this nifty animation, and if this doesn’t sell you, I don’t know what will:

How cool is that?