We were really impressed by how simple the Tippitoes is to fit to (and remove from) a door frame, it really did take a matter of seconds to secure the clamp over the architraving. You do need to make sure that your door frame is suitable: the walls need to be between 10 and 17cm thick, you need a solid architrave of at least 1.5cm width around the door and it should be at least 75cm wide. However, if you don't have the first two then you can get in touch with Tippitoes for a special hook to drill into the doorway.
Your doorway width is important, as any less than 75cm wide and your baby could quite well swing enough to one side to bang his head on the door frame.
It probably takes a little longer to get your baby in and out of the bouncer than it does to fix the bouncer to the door frame. If you're doing it alone then expect it to take a minute or so to get baby comfortably in the right position and clipped in. First you fit baby into the harness and clip around the waist, then you fit the harness to the support bar very simply by sliding a harness loop into a clip at each end of the bar and finally you clip the bar to the bouncer.
Bearing in mind that it's recommended that you only use the bouncer for up to twenty minutes at a time, you might think that that's a bit of a faff. In our experience, however, it's certainly worth any bit of faff there is for the fun that usually follows. The bouncer is most cumbersome on those times if your baby gets tired when bouncing and you then have to extract a grumpy baby from the harness.
Baby's verdict
I was keen to try a baby bouncer largely because I could remember how much fun one provided in our multiple-sibling household as a youngster, and the Tippitoes hasn't disappointed. For the first two or three goes, our son didn't really know what to make of it all and hung in the doorway looking perplexed and mildly apprehensive. After a bit of encouragement and some assisted bouncing though, he suddenly got the hang of it and was delighted to be able to control his own movements.
Now over six months' old and a seasoned bounce expert, he usually spends most of his twenty minutes giggling and squealing with joy as he bounces and spins, looking disturbingly as though he's in an audition for River Dance.
While it does seem a bit of a shame that it's only recommended that your baby bounces for twenty minutes at a time, we've found that this is usually about as much as ours is interested in at one time anyway and in any case we prefer to take him out before the novelty has totally worn off.
