A while back I mentioned that my wife is a creature of convenience, and at times, that convenience can sometimes turn inconvenient. She really has a lot of great ideas, and I generally back her up. I did this time with the Summer Infant Foldaway Baby Bath the SIFBB for short. When we purchased the SIFBB the ability to fold and put it away was awesome. That was it. We didn’t know what else to look for in a baby tub.
When I opened the box to reveal our newest piece of baby equipment, that beautiful smell of PVC wafted through the air. Gripping it eagerly, I fumbled around with the SIFBB and noticed that unfolding it required some sort of sorcery that I would only learn from the magical “instruction booklet.” The booklet was obviously written by a first year wizard with poor skills in diagramming. After a good 15 minutes I learned I was doing it right, it just required me to open a can of whoop-ass on some “buttons” that would unfold it all the way. Those four legs were a process. I don’t know why it had to be so damn hard to unfold this thing.
Upon unfolding the SIFBB I then learned that I had to use my weak ass fat man lungs to inflate the base. It just took a few puffs, that’s fine. Just more hoops to hop through on the journey to give my baby a bath. After getting it together it looked like this:
Okay, so I get the tub together and ready to roll. I notice the base is able to be manipulated. You can lift both sides at an angle, one side, or you can keep the base flat. Now, it is 2014. We have used PVC plastic for inflatables for the last … 10 million years … and we should know that when warm soapy water hits this stuff, it gets slipperier than a catfish belly. Trying every base setup, I just threw a towel under the baby to keep her from sliding around like a flailing penguin. Also, the snaps to hook the base to the hard rim of the tub? You need to warm those up with the water before snapping them, because if you don’t, you will question your limp wristedness.
I wish I could say I had the patience of Job, but I don’t. I don’t get all screamy and bitchy around the baby, but when she’s not, I want to burn things and chop trees down (I blame nature for everything…that’s the only natural thing to do). After overcoming the slipperiness, I then was tasked with cleanup. I dumped the water and rinsed it off, which resulted in my floor being doused in water. I dried it off and folded it up. I’m glad it took me so long to unfold it at first. It was a cinch to reverse engineer the damn thing. To put back into the box. I can’t say I cared much about the storage issues after dealing with this thing’s bullshit.
2 out of 5 stars. I will just use my kitchen sink, that’s the best storage and I don’t have to worry about my kid getting “the cancers” from PVC exposure.