My wife and I have always enjoyed dining out together. When we lived in San Francisco, we made a point to dine out together every week. It’s been an important ritual in our relationship, one that we knew we wanted to continue even after becoming parents. That might mean dining out less often and at more casual restaurants, but it is still important for us to try new foods and get out of the house.

This was actually pretty easy to maintain when our daughter was first born, as she was mostly a potato and we could simply park her in the stroller. Within a week of being born she had made her first trip to Starbucks, and a few days later she had her first dining out experience at a local burger joint.

Things started to get a little tricky around seven months, when she was ready to start sitting in a highchair at restaurants and was no longer content to simply look at a couple dangling toys on her stroller. We’d go to a restaurant and she would quickly get fussy. She was not a particularly good eater at that time, so offering her food didn’t help much either. We’d try bringing some of her toys, but half the time they would end up on the ground and we’d spend most of the dinner picking them up.

We were no longer having the kind of dining out experience that we had been accustomed to and it was starting to put our convictions to the test. I decided to give the issue some serious thought, and started by framing the problem.

What problem am I trying to solve?

I started with one of the most useful questions one can ask, “what problem am I trying to solve?”. I wanted to be able to keep my infant daughter entertained while dining out at a restaurant so that my wife and I could have a pleasant dinner.

At that stage, entertaining her pretty much meant physical toys, since she wasn’t able to manage picture books on her own, she didn’t like solid foods much, and we didn’t want to introduce screens for regular dining out occasions.

I then needed to think about the constraints for a possible solution:

• It has to be easily portable – it has to be something that fits in a diaper bag or is an easy grab-and-go kit
• It can’t be something that’s easily knocked down and requires us to constantly pick it up
• It has to be easy to clean
• It has be relatively easy to set up

With those basic parameters in mind, I started investigating a solution.

Prototyping a solution

Internet searches for highchair toys revealed that there were a number of suction cup toys intended to be stuck to smooth highchair trays. We purchased several of these but quickly found that in practice, most restaurant table tops aren’t smooth enough for them to stick to. The toys were engaging for Parker, the issue was that there weren’t many places we could use them.

If there was a way to make the restaurant table into a smooth surface then we could actually keep her quite busy with these. The question was then how to make a smooth mounting surface that could attach to most tables. What I wanted was the smooth highchair tray, but some way of clamping it to the restaurant table.

I started by looking for a tray with a completely smooth surface. I found one that was roughly 8 x 12, which seemed like a good size in that it was small enough to be shoved into a diaper bag or backpack but big enough that it could hold a couple toys.

For the clamps, I picked up some inexpensive 4-inch trigger clamps. The clamping could be done with C-clamps but trigger clamps would be easier to use under the table where you wouldn’t be able to see your hands.

The jaws of the small clamps I wanted to use wouldn’t clear the lip of the tray so I would need to drill holes in the tray to be able to actually clamp through the tray, with the tray being sandwiched between the clamping jaws. I have these positioned so that they are set back far enough so that the top jaw was still inside the boundary of the tray and positioned close to the sides so that there was plenty of room for toys.

In order to be able to fully take the trigger clamps apart I had to knock out a pin on the back of the sliding arm that is there to prevent it from sliding off when opening. I then took each clamp apart and slid the moving arm through a hole and before reassembling the clamp, at which point I could attach it to a table by squeezing the triggers.

With that minimal amount of work I had a way to clamp the tray to just about any table, and then attach the suction cup toys to it. We tried it a few times in the wild and it worked really well. We were able to eat dinner at the local pizza joint that has rough reclaimed wood tables and it worked perfectly. One of the other nice discoveries about the tray is that it actually projects out over the highchair and makes it an easier surface for her to eat off of, rather than her having to lean forward over the table.

Something I didn’t like about the set up was that the clamps were often loose in the diaper bag, so there was often a fair amount of digging around for them before I could start assembling the tray. I wanted to figure out a way to store them on the tray itself so that I didn’t have to look for them.

Improving the design

I was having trouble figuring out a way to attach the clamps to the tray without impacting the smooth surface area, and keeping the profile generally flat.

The clamps could be attached to the lip of the tray, or even perpendicular on the face of the tray, but that would make it take up more space in an already crowded diaper bag. Velcro patches could be used to stick them to the tray, but that would further reduce the smooth space on the tray for toys.

I had two thoughts about how to solve this. One would be to add a suction cup to the clamps. Then I could use the same mechanism for affixing the toys and the clamps. I couldn’t think of a clever way to attach a small suction cup to the clamp however, and it also felt like there had to be a way to leverage the clamping action of the clamp itself, rather than introduce some other binding mechanism like suction or Velcro. The issue was that there was nothing convenient for the clamp to attach to.

The solution I eventually came to was create that “something” for the clamp to attach to. Ideally there would be some sort of tab that was perpendicular to the tray surface that I could clamp the clamp too. I tried to think of ways to create this, and the approach I settled on was using a right-angle bracket. I used my Dremel tool to route a slit on either side of the hole that the clamp goes through. This doesn’t impact the surface area much, but it allows me to slide a bracket through and then clamp down on it. I actually went through the trouble of making a jig to guide the router to cut the slits, which was probably overkill but helped make straight cuts.

I had achieved the goal of not having loose clamps, but now I would have loose angle brackets unless I found a way to attach them to the tray. The solution I came to was using decoy cord, which is strong but bends easily, waterproof, doesn’t fray, and could be cut to whatever length I needed.

Eventually I turned this into a grab-and-go kit by putting all of it into a packing cube with the tray and a handful of suction cup toys, so it was ready to go at a moments notice. I even included a little 2-ounce spray bottle with water that I could use to mist the suction cups before attaching, which improves their strength.

Results

Generally speaking, the tray worked really well for us until Parker started to outgrow it. For us, that was about a five month window. Once she hit about 14 or 15 months, she started to get pretty bored with the original assortment of toys and wanted to wiggle more. That being said, it worked really well before she phased out of it. On multiple occasions we had strangers come over and ask us where we had bought the tray.

Something that helped to keep the tray novel was that she didn’t have access to it at home; she only got to play with those specific toys when we were dining out.

The total cost was pretty minimal. The tray was $14, the clamps were $12, the angle brackets were $8 dollars, and I already had the decoy rigging line. The toys were also pretty inexpensive, around $30 in total. Her favorites were the suction cup fidget spinner, a Ferris wheel with sprinkles, and an octopus-looking teether thing. Total investment was about 70 bucks, which was well worth the price of enjoying many dinners out together.

My daughter has since lost interest in it (she can barely sit still even at home now), but it provided a ton of entertainment for her from about 8 to 14 months. We were able to have some wonderful dinners out together with the help of the tray.

Being able to eat out together as a family is something that is important to both my wife and I, and anything that might help with that is worth experimenting with.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this is not an approved child toy design nor is this intended to be an instructional tutorial. What you do with your own time, money, and kids is your business.