The best baby bathtub ever

As our kids start to move out of baby­hood, I feel the need to tell some­one about the best baby gear we came across while help­ing them sur­vive to tod­dler­hood. I also have a pair of friends about to have a baby (Hi Denny, Hi Aprille!), who prob­a­bly already have all their gear lined up, but you never know.

First up is the best baby bath­tub ever. It has no tem­per­a­ture sen­sor, no cushy foam pad, no fold and pack fea­tures. It is just one, huge piece of molded plas­tic, but it is still the best baby tub. The Euro­bath by Primo. We started our babies in it when they were the barest of infants, with this behe­moth of a bath on the counter in our kitchen. The bath con­tours are molded such that infants can lay in it, safely cra­dled. Even our squirmi­est baby did not man­age to upend him­self and drown, even while splash­ing and play­ing and giggling.

As the kids got older, we first moved the bath to our reg­u­lar tub (mostly because of the copi­ous splash­ing going on, the kitchen was get­ting too wet), then we turned the kids around, so instead of lay­ing down at one end of the Euro­bath, they were sit­ting up at the other end. A word of warn­ing, the splash­ing only gets more impres­sive when they can sit up. When you’re done, it has a drain fea­ture (though we just dumped the whole thing out, but it can get heavy if you fill it a lot), and you can hang it on a hook to dry out.

You won’t go wrong with this thing. Most places are sell­ing it for about $25. Baby­Cen­ter users rate it 5/5 stars with 245 com­ments. Ama­zon users rate it 4.5/5 stars with 581 com­ments. Babies­RUs users rate it 5/5 stars on 116 comments.

The man­u­fac­turer says it is for birth to 2 years, but we found our boys did bet­ter in the tub proper by about a year. We finally gave ours away to friends here in Lawrence. I do wish they’d named it some­thing else though, it feels like I’m endors­ing some kind of Euro­pean singing competition.