Gabey Proofing

To elaborate on my last post, it turns out that our house is one big baby death trap.

I thought Matt and I were doing a pretty good job making things safe for our little crawler. We put those little plastic plugs in all of the electrical outlets. We're installing locks on all of the bathroom drawers and cupboard doors. We put up baby gates in the kitchen doorways. We put a brightly colored foam playmat down over part of our lovely Mexican ceramic tile floor. We even replaced the pointy-cornered coffee table of death with a nice leather ottoman-type thing.

And still, the baby keeps finding extremely dangerous and disgusting things to play with. For example, he discovered a large hairball gacked up by one of the cats right in the middle of the floor under our dining room table, where I couldn't see it but he could. (Luckily I got to that before he did - his general excitement at crawling under the normally boring table tipped me off that something was going on down there). Similarly, he found a choking-hazardous raisin beneath the couch, probably left behind by my lovely niece Parker. He also discovered that it's really fun to pull on the living room curtains as hard as possible to see if he can pull them down. (The good news is that he cannot, even when he throws his entire eighteen-pound body weight into the attempt.) He has also tried crawling into the cat litter boxes (we stopped him), knocking over a porcelain vase (he couldn't quite reach it), and chewing on an electrical cord (it never even got near his mouth, so don't worry).

Fig. 1: Baby Attempts to Pull Down Living Room Curtains

Whew. I knew crawling would change the game, but I simply didn't realize what I would be dealing with. He's a tiny tornado of dangerous activity. A tiny but extremely cheerful tornado.

The good news is that - also like a tornado - he isn't stealthy at all. You know how people make their pet cats wear collars with little bells on them? We considered it, but we don't really need to put a bell on Gabe, he's so noisy when he moves across the floor. He looks and sounds very much like an iguana, slapping his hands really hard onto the ground, which sort of gives the game away.

He also sticks out his tongue like an iguana, now that I think about it:

Fig. 2: Iguana Tongue

So the bad news is that he has no respect for danger or his own body and it's become very, very exhausting to chase after him as he whimsically attempts to inflict great bodily injury on himself despite my spending all that money on baby proofing items (i.e. the aforementioned locks for cupboards that Gabe has never shown any actual interest in trying to open). The good news is that he's slow enough and klutzy enough that we have no problems anticipating his next moves and cutting him off at the pass.

If his crawling becomes more proficient or ninja-style though, we are in serious trouble. Perhaps we will simply empty the house of furniture, leaving only the leather ottoman thing and the foam floor padding. And his 18,327 toys, of course - we'll keep the toys. Because if we remove all the danger and hairballs and breakable vases, he's going to need something to play with.

Oooh, I can't wait until he starts walking!