When Lucy started eating solid food and wasn’t quite so mobile, I used to put her snacks in a bowl on the floor. She’d tip it over ever now and then and wind up eating off the carpet quite a bit as most kids do. One day I remembered that we had this thing called a Snack Trap in our increasingly disorganized baby cupboard and decided to give it a shot. Now I can barely pry it out of Lu’s hands for naps and potty time.

It’s an incredibly simple design with just two parts. You’ve got your plastic two-handled cup adorned with some kind of cute animal (ours has a monkey on it as you can see) and then a more rubbery top piece that allows the kid to put their hand in without pulling out all the contents at once. The great thing about the Snack Trap is that she can hold onto it like a sippy cup and run all over the house without making as much of a mess. I say “as much as” because every room in our house as at least a few pieces of cereal that we wind up stepping on, but that’s mostly because she drops them or pulls out a few more than she can handle when dipping in for more snacks. It’s not a perfect system (though when it comes to babies and toddlers, I don’t think such a thing exists) but it had become one of her favorite things, has given her some independence to eat and run as she pleases and definitely keeps the number of cereal bits on the ground lower than we had become used to. For all that, the Snack Trap gets the Pop Poppa seal of approval.

Speaking of which, does anyone want to design a Pop Poppa seal of approval?