Bumbo Safety Mod

So Angela sends me a quick e‑mail note regard­ing a recall of our favorite lit­tle kids foam seat, the Bum­bo1. The recall is regard­ing the fact that sev­er­al chil­dren have been injured (some quite seri­ous­ly, I under­stand) top­pling out of the seat. Well, lit­tle tod­dlers being squirmy and all, they tend to do that. Espe­cial­ly just when mom or dad stepped away from the table and the lit­tle one gets bored.

…and they get bored in about two sec­onds, so this is easy to imag­ine and hard for me to place too much blame on the par­ents. We’re all only human.

For that mat­ter, I don’t blame Bum­bo, either. There’s a warn­ing on the back of each one. In red let­ters! It essen­tial­ly says that the Bum­bo should only be placed at floor lev­el and not on ele­vat­ed sur­faces. Appar­ent­ly, some lawyers (the nasty kind who see every­one as suable bank accounts and not human beings) got a hold of this and deter­mined that the warn­ing was­n’t clear enough and that the prod­uct need­ed to be recalledSeri­ous­ly, read the descrip­tion and rem­e­dy at the CSPC’s site. Fur­ther, tell me if there is some­thing I’m miss­ing here.

Note: there’s no lead paint, no flam­ma­ble mate­ri­als, not even any mov­ing parts (the Bum­bo is one sol­id piece of foam, in case you did­n’t already know). And they’re recall­ing it because the warn­ing on it appar­ent­ly was­n’t big or sim­ple enough for people.

Frankly, I think this is going just a bit over­board. Fol­low the warm­ing label if you have any con­cerns or doubts. How­ev­er, I don’t see any rea­son why the Bum­bo is going to be a prob­lem to put on a table-top pro­vid­ed there is some more strict super­vi­sion. I’d hate it if Ains­ley got hurt, but that’s why we go out of our way to make sure she does­n’t go tum­bling off of things in gen­er­al, includ­ing Bum­bos. But, just to put this in per­spec­tive, 28 out of over 1,000,000 Bum­bos have result­ed in injuries from kids tak­ing a face-plate. That’s 0.0028 per­cent for the divi­sion­al­ly chal­lenged. Though I don’t have any hard num­bers, I’d be will­ing to bet a high­er per­cent­age have fall­en out of peo­ple’s hands.

Just in case you’re still wor­ried about your Bum­bo, here’s a solu­tion I came up with to help keep your child in the seat (though no word if the seat won’t go over with the espe­cial­ly roudy ones):

And just in case it needs say­ing, you take respon­si­bil­i­ty if you do this. Not me or Bum­bo. Of course, you could just buy the plas­tic food tray that would prob­a­bly accom­plish the same thing.

Also:

• Greg at Dad­dy­Types, always on top of the lat­est child-relat­ed recalls, points out that at least this recall has a safe­ty fix (no mat­ter how ridiculous).
• jtnel­so’s Bum­bo Fun Pho­to Set could pos­si­ble be seen as “What Not To Do With Your Bum­bo and Child,” but I find it no less awesome.

1. Our friends Chris and Sal­ly first intro­duced us to the Bum­bo when their son, Mason, was using one. We’ve had sev­er­al oth­er friends since that have also expressed their love for the Bum­bo and it was one of the ear­ly gifts we received (as I recall, from C & S, even!). [↩]