We have Juice for dinner.  The Juice high chair we were sent to review from Mamas & Papas.

Frankly, I am not a fan of this “Apple Green” color.  It’s more like “canned pea” green, in my opinion.  Fortunately, this (like other Mamas & Papas products) comes in other colors, as well.  This particular high chair comes in a  “raspberry,” I think.  It also comes in neutral black.  Even with the icky color, though, it’s still functional – and very well designed.

The Juice High Chair

It comes disassembled, like so:

But the assembly process is very easy.  A few screws require a Phillips-head screwdriver; everything else just snaps into place.  And even the assembly process is well designed.  Everything is quite clearly marked, so there’s no confusion.  It goes something like this:

Turn the chair upside-down and locate the numbers at the corners where the legs will attach.  Each “hip,” if you will, is numbered.

Locate the upper leg portion.  See where those two pieces are going to fit together?  You just pop them on.  (I had picked up the wrong leg in this photo, which I corrected before attaching it!)

Now somewhere in here, I had to screw on the foot rest.  I’m not sure why there aren’t pictures of that, but it was pretty easy.  The numbered legs indicated which ones to attach and where, and there was just a single screw at each end of the foot rest.

Lower Legs – and the Junior Chair Option

Then we attach the lower legs to the upper legs.  Why?  Well, because this particular high chair has a pretty neat feature – you can remove the lower legs and use it as a “junior chair.” (In this case, you’d just pop the little round ends – green, in this case – off the lower legs and attach them to the upper legs instead.  If you look at the picture of the parts, you can see these rounded ends.)  These pop on in a very similar manner as the upper legs did.

See how, once again, these are clearly numbered?

Now that little metal doohickey is going to depress as we slide it in, and then pop out through that hole.

See?  Depressed…

…and in the hole.  (If you want to convert this to a junior chair, you’ll just press this button to be able to slide the lower leg back off.)

Finishing Up

Now, for stability, we need to add this x-shaped crossbar thing.

The ends slide into these little “cups.”

And you slide these caps over the top to hold them in place.  The caps are screwed on.  (The one other spot that requires a screwdriver!)

Ta-Da!

For converting back and forth between high chair and junior chair there are a couple other steps, involving the seat itself.  There’s a divider that goes between baby’s legs.  To use the seat as a junior chair, you remove this (using an included hex wrench) and replace it with a more-or-less flat plate.  You also remove the harness and replace it with a couple small spacers.

The what?  The harness.  Another really cool thing about this high chair is that it has a five-point harness.  You can’t get any safer a restraint for a high chair than that!

Everything is smooth and rounded, making it easy to wipe down.  (I hate it when high chairs have a zillion little nooks and crannies for food to get stuck in.  I’m glad these guys thought of that when they designed the Juice!  No nooks and crannies!)

And the tray is really, really easy to get on and off because the mechanism is very simple.  The only downside is that the mechanism is so simple it doesn’t have a one-hand removal option.  But since your child will be securely restrained by a five-point harness while you remove the tray, he’s not going to fall out while you take it off.

Press the buttons and the tray slides off.  No sticking.  No catching.  It just comes off.

It would be nice if all the seat-related stuff weren’t necessary for converting the seat.  For use with a single child, that should be no big deal – you use it as a high chair until baby is too big and then you switch it over.  Once.  For those of us with multiple children, it would be nice to be able to swap it back and forth just by switching out the legs, since that’s quick and easy. But you can’t have everything, right?

More Mamas & Papas

Mamas and Papas makes other stuff, too.  There is another high chair style.  A booster seat (in the works – it’ll be available soon).  Strollers.  You get the idea.  They also make baby clothes.  There’s a sneak peek in this post; stay tuned for a better look in another post.

Disclosure: Just in case it wasn’t clear, I was provided with the high chair seen in this post, to facilitate my review.  I did not receive any other compensation.  (Well, they sent outfits for my two littlest ones, too; you’ll see those in another post.  No money changed hands.)  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.