I found this rather amusing: Last night, Liz and I put together an ExerSaucer Ultra for Tyler. While many of our friends have raved about this toy, I swear, the assembly of this thing had more parts and was more complicated than putting together a computer.

My first clue should of been some of the warnings at the beginning of the manual:

The sad part is that there’s probably someone out there who actually thought that this could be filled with water at some point.

I was then treated to instructions such as:

“4. Assembling Pad To Seat Ring: Turn seat ring right side up. Align triangle (D) on the back of the seat ring with the red diamond (E) on the seat pad label. Snap the plastic tabs (F) on the pad over the pegs (G) on the seat ring. Continue this process untill all the tabs are attached to all the pegs“.

It’s amazing my head didn’t explode - heck, it took me 5 minutes just to find some mysterous “red diamond” that I was supposed to align to the “triangle” (which, I also couldn’t find).

I must admit though that the most helpful parenting tip was found in the section which describes how to collapse the ExerSaucer for storage:

“15. Folding the UltraSaucer: To Fold: ALWAYS remove baby from UltraSaucer before folding. With the ultrasaucer flat on the floor……“

Um, please don’t tell me someone actually trying to FOLD this thing with a baby in it.