Or, more realistically, plastic or wood? Yes, we're talking about the construction of high chairs.

This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question for Christina and I. It's one of those questions I alluded to earlier, where neither of us had ever even properly considered the perspective of the other.

I grew up sitting in a plastic-and-metal contraption designed to be light, mobile and easy to clean. In some modern ones, you can just put the whole tray into the dishwasher. This has always seemed to me to be a simple and practical solution to the problem of getting children to sit at the table while minimizing the total amount of cleaning necessary afterward. However, when we looked together at high chairs like this, Christina's reaction was something like "Ugh, what a tacky plastic monster. How American can you get?"

It turns out that she prefers something kind of like the model you see often in restaurants: a simple design of four wooden legs, a wooden seat, and no tray. This, she feels, is a more elegant high-chair from a more civilized age: you just pull the kid up to the table and let them eat like a grownup. The tradeoff is that you have to spend quite a bit more time cleaning everything.

The compromise model will probably end up being one that has plastic trays and a wooden frame. It's more or less Christina's choice, but in a fancy variant which doesn't assume that you maintain sufficient household staff to take care of all the cleaning. Not only can this one be adjusted to comfortably seat children from the smallest who can sit upright to kids just about ready to sit in an adult chair, but it can also be adapted to securely fit a baby carrier for kids too young to actually sit upright yet. One strong argument in favor of this model is that one of her co-workers has offered to sell us the baby carrier that matches this model. Success!

Of course, high-end models like this aren't exactly cheap, but Christina's mom has offered to subsidize the high chair of our choice. It's not that we're only getting the best when we're spending someone else's money, of course; it's that when offered an opportunity like this, we're naturally going to seek to maximize the investment by getting something which should stand the test of time.

Hopefully she'll buy not just the chair, but that explanation.