Friday Flashback | One Perfect Day

Each week I look back at some of the things we did during my pre-blogging days. I affectionately call these posts my Friday Flashback series. A few people contacted me this week, asking what the blue structure is that R(3) is seen standing on, in our mixing oil and water post. It is a fantastic tool that we use every single day in our kitchen and so I’ve decided to make it the topic of this week’s Friday Flashback.

This is what we affectionately call the “blue thing”. It is our DIY version of a Little Helper Funpod. “What on earth is a Little Helper Funpod?” I hear you ask. The original Funpod can be seen here. It’s a safe structure for kids to stand on while working at high benches such as in the kitchen. MUCH safer than the dining chair we had been been using! We always involve R with whatever we are doing, and that includes cooking family meals (it’s part of the whole Montessori approach that we try to implement). Before we built this, he would stand on one of our dining chairs. The chair was unstable, it would frequently slip out from under him as he pushed against the kitchen bench and I was always concerned about him falling off the side. I was familiar with the official Funpod and knew it would be ideal, but they retailed for upwards of $300 so it was well beyond our budget. Thanks to Pinterest, I found this DIY project from the completely amazing, talented and generous Ana White. If you’re not already familiar with Ana White, take a minute to visit her site. She designs and builds hundreds of DIY furniture projects (all of them completely gorgeous) and she shares the plans for FREE. How completely amazing is she?

No toppling over or falling off the stool any more.

All together, including materials and paint, this cost us about $70 to build. It would be even less if you arleady had some paint on hand. Mr Perfect Day whipped this up in a few hours and it was painted by yours truly. This was the first thing I had ever painted in my entire life and I was so proud of myself. I think it took me longer to paint it than it did for Mr Pefect Day to build it! Ha!

The reasons why I am completely in love with this helper tower are:

The height of the platform where the child stands is completely adjustable. As your child grows, just lower the platform.
The child is contained on all four sides
it is very solid and stable

I actually like this version of the helper tower MORE than the expensive Funpod version for two very important reasons:

In this version, the child can us the rungs of the tower as a ladder and can climb in and out of the tower independently. (In the Funpod version, the child must be lifted in and out of the tower)
And the very BEST feature of all…..it folds flat for storage. (You can’t do THAT with the pricey version!)