CHILDPROOFING

When you have a baby, you start thinking about childproofing your environment. You may put away some crystal treasures and buy the plastic clips and outlet covers – but you’re still way off base. Beloved Offspring #1 had those allegedly childproof clips figured out before the tender age of one. While many of those products are extremely useful and, like the one that locks the under-the-sink-where-the-deadly-cleaners-are-stored cabinet, a parenting necessity, I have learned from experience some common sense approaches to child proofing. And you will, too – as you go along. As grown-ups we are blind to many dangers that lurk right under our noses, because we use items the way we’re supposed to use them. We follow the rules. Infants and toddlers don’t even know the rules yet, and don’t usually care about them even when they do know them. Shoes can be sand shovels – or water goblets – to a toddler. We love their imagination and nurture their creativity, but sometimes it’s downright dangerous.

The most obvious way to keep a little one out of a dangerous room like a bathroom is to close the door. It’s quick and it’s free but it’s sadly temporary – it only works until the child is tall enough to reach the doorknob and old enough to figure out how to work the doorknob. Beloved Offspring #3 is halfway there already.

I’ve also become much better at improvising child safety techniques. While at an appointment, I protected Beloved Offspring #2 and #3 by covering the electrical outlets with adhesive tape. And a trip to Grandma’s was almost a disaster until we used electrical tape on her under-the-sink-where-the-deadly-cleaners-are-stored cabinet. At another appointment I had to turn the garbage can around so the little swingy door (aka coolest toy on the planet) faced the wall and went unnoticed.

Another example is sharp corners, like the ones on the footboard of my bed. I always have bruises on my hips and thighs from bumping into them. If that’s what those edges can do to my toned, muscular body (stop laughing!) imagine what it would do to the tender little heads and bodies of my beloved offspring! Cheap and quick solution – when I make the bed, I pull all the blankets over the edges. Again, a sadly temporary fix. The first bed-bouncer will muss the covers enough to expose the evil right angles once again. But who knows how many bumps and bruises we have been spared by my new bed-making strategy.

Thanks to the area where we live, we need to add earthquake straps to tall pieces of furniture. But even parents who don’t live on a fault line are encouraged to add these reinforcements to bookcases and armoires, because children eventually learn how to climb. And if they don’t learn they have an older sibling or visiting cousin who teaches them. To a child determined to reach something on a top shelf, bookcases are really just nice, deep ladders. And anything desirable that is not on a bookcase can be reached with the help of a climbable chair or even something stackable, like books.

Even after you have searched high and low for dangers to your child, the little rascals will find ways to invent new ones. They might stretch a little arm around a corner and pull on something connected to a dangerous object, like a cord or a tail. This is how my youngest son almost dumped our recently used, still hot and greasy indoor grill on his head – despite our carefully installed kitchen gate.

Whenever I put down a cup of hot coffee, I carefully and lovingly make sure it is out of reach of my precious offspring. But my precious offspring are crafty, and will attempt to reach it anyway – or make it reach them. They do it with cups of cold beverages, too, but it’s more of a safety issue with hot ones. Their latest tactic is to pull at the item on which the drink rests, like a placemat or a newspaper or a rickety end table.

As a last resort, my kids will feign injury or launch into a tantrum in order to be picked up and thus be closer to the prize. But we as parents (or grandparents or babysitters or caregivers) must be vigilant. It only takes a moment for

Ps – While I was working on this entry, Beloved Offspring #3 pried off an outlet cover. Good thing I work from home!