Our apartment now
What we're aiming for
Although Will isn't crawling yet, there's a glint in his eye that suggests that he'll soon be scooting around the apartment like a Roomba. Unfortunately Matt and I have given babyproofing about as much thought as... ohhh...
(hours go by)
Yep. That's how little we've given it.
So yesterday we decided to tackle the problem head on, which mostly consisted of us standing in the middle of the living room having conversations like this:
Matt (eyeballing the glass topped coffee table): "We should probably babyproof that."
Me: "Yeah, we probably should..."
Matt (pointing at the easily opened, glass front bookshelf): "And that too."
Me: "Uh-huh."
Matt (kicking at the tangle of computer wires): "And these."
I could go on.
Obviously we needed to narrow down the field a bit. A search for babyproofing turned up sites offering such essential items as a Choke Tube Tester (a toilet paper roll works just as well), Baby Knee Pads (These medical-grade neoprene knee guards give little crawlers unparalleled protection, while slip-proof "traction beads" guard against skidding!) and something called a Bumper Bonnet which has to be seen to be believed. We also discovered a wealth of professional babyproofers who'll be happy to come to our home and do the work for us, starting at only $200 an hour. (Pardon me while I search the couch cushions for change.) Since we're planning on doing an apartment overhaul in the next few weeks (moving our bed into the living room and turning the bedroom into Will's room-slash-Matt's office) we figure we'll just do it all at once. And by "we'll do it all at once" I mean "we have no idea what we're doing".
Questions:
- What did you do with floor lamps?
- How did you handle glass panels? (i.e. bookshelves, coffee tables)
- Litter boxes. The hell?
I'm just assuming that cat food will get eaten and that at least once I'll find the child with his head in the garbage but if you have any advice to throw my way, I'll gladly take it.
3 comments:
We sort of haven't done any since the twins were born and are relying on what we did initially for Caitlin.
We installed child locks on a lot of cabinets that we never removed. We took everything off of the bottom 4 shelves or 4' that she could reach and put away all vases and pretty breakable stuff. We also had a glass topped coffee table and just made sure there were no hard toys in the same room it was in to be banged on it.
Right now, we keep them penned into their room and the livingroom and block off things like floor lamps behind other, larger pieces of furniture. Otherwise, the floorlamps have to go. The one in their room had to go once they discovered it in the corner and started pulling on the cord.
We don't have any corner bumper things, or anything else like it. Certainly no head guards or knee pads. Those knees need to toughen up! We do have a few baby gates that we move around at need.
You may want to consider making a specific AREA safe rather than the whole apartment. Babies don't need to crawl in the kitchen, anyway!
There's a coffee table there? I'm still ogling the view.
Our version of baby proofing consisted of plugging in some of those plug-guard thingies and semi-securing cabinet doors with huge rubber bands. I am not even kidding (please don't report me, OK?). Oh, and I removed the big heavy artificial flower arrangement from our coffee table, but it was ugly and needed to go anyway.
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