Infant Shark Suit

I was sitting around the other day and it occurred to me that if my wife and I wanted to vacation somewhere tropical now that we have a baby it presents a new set of limitations to what we could do for fun.  I love to dive, for example, and would love to take my wife with me, but what do you do with a baby?  Set up a crib on deck and let the seagulls feed her if she gets hungry?  Then I thought "Wouldn't it be nice if I could take little Samantha with us?"  Why not, I've seen dogs and even a cat scuba diving.  Settled then, she dives with us!

Unfortunately, babies aren't exactly the best swimmers.  No problem - I'll just tie a line around her and hook it to my waste and drag her around under the deep blue sea.  Get her neutrally buoyant so she's not bobbing up to the surface like a balloon.   She'll love that! 

Then it occurred to me - SHARKS!  Dragging around a little baby on a 20 foot line would basically be like trolling for sharks.  Oh, I'd feel it if one took a nibble, but by then it might be too late.  What I needed was some kind of shark suit for a baby.  Surprisingly when I went on Amazon to order one there weren't any.  I hit the Googles and shockingly there didn't appear to be one in existence.  Well never fear new-parent scuba divers, now there is!

         
A great deal of though went into the development and production of this suit.  We initially called it the Infant Shark Suit, or ISS, but apparently ISS is already taken.  We are currently calling it the ScuBaby.  Every detail is designed to shark-proof your little bundle of joy and keep him/her from becoming a little bundle of chum while under water:

• The protective kevlar-ish material can easily withstand bite pressures of up to 3 pounds, probably.  I'm not 100% sure what the bite pressure of a full grown shark is, but if it's more than 3 pounds I'll be surprised. 
• It's designed to be completely inflexible, thus keeping the limbs outstretched to their maximum and making your baby look as large as possible to any sharks.
• It's a well-known fact that sharks hate pastels.  As you can see, we have utilized pink as the primary color with blue and purple pastel accents to confuse the man-eaters.  Unfortunately, this is the only color we feel confident to produce the suit in which is great for a little girl but if your little boy has an issue with the color, ask him if he'd rather be stylish or eaten by a shark. 
• The head piece mimics one of the sharks natural enemies, the owl!
• The dangling tassels are designed to simulate snakes.  To be honest, we're not really sure what sharks think about snakes, but pretty much everyone gets the heebie-jeebies thinking about snakes in water, so we're pretty sure it will have the same affect on sharks.
• The zipper is color-coded to the suit to make it hard to spot so even the cleverest of sharks will struggle to find it should they get the idea to unzip the little one for better access.

After we produced the first suit we obviously needed to test it.  Since I would never sell you something to protect your child that I wouldn't use on mine, little Sammy Cat courageously volunteered to be our human test subject.  Unfortunately, we were visiting my mother in North Texas at the time so finding sharks, or open water for that matter, proved challenging.  we decided to test the water tendencies of the suit in the snow - it's basically the same thing from a hydrodynamic standpoint.

Open Water Test - Successful!

We are happy to report that the suit achieved perfect neutral buoyancy in the snow and we have decided that will translate without variance to open water.  It also kept her mostly dry.  We say mostly because there was some internal dampness but we were unable to determine if this was a result of leakage from the suit or leakage from the baby.

The final step was the shark bite test.  As previously mentioned, finding live sharks was challenging.  Once again, Amazon was a complete disappointment.  The local Petco had some rather ill-tempered looking Beta fish, but we decided that wouldn't really satisfy our lofty requirements.  We settled on the next closest thing to being bitten by a shark - being bitten by a large predatory Rescue Panther!

Shark Bite Test - Successful!

Now if I'm being honest, we never could actually get our large predatory Rescue Panther to bite the suit - Gracie isn't really a biter.  However, we did throw mice on the suit and the baby survived the de-mouseing from Gracie without a scratch.  We attempted to get our other cat George to bite the suit, but he only bites when his food bowl is empty and unfortunately he doesn't yet view our daughter as a potential food distribution source so he wouldn't nip her anyway.  

As you can clearly see, this suit has been radically engineered and extensively tested to insure that your little one can safely enjoy the wonders of underwater exploration with you.  Family time no longer needs to stop at the shoreline, now it can extend to even the most shark infested waters on the planet.  

You're welcome world!

Disclaimer:  The Infant Shark Suit is not guaranteed to withstand assault from Grouper, mutated Sea Bass, or sharks with lasers attached to their heads.