It wasn’t until this past Easter weekend when my 11-month old son started getting into the trash, pulling over chairs, and pretty much anything else that’s about 24 inches from the floor that I realized I’ve gotten pretty laid-back about “babyproofing” the house.
My wife and I are nowhere as scared with the second kid as we were with the first. With our daughter we pretty much babyproofed 99.9% of the house with about every gadget or contraption possible that placed panic or fear on us. It’s hard to believe that at one time, it was possible to run through our house, with shiny scissors, drunk, on fire, and not get hurt.
Yes, those were the days where we would take some serious trips to the local “Baby’s R Us” and head straight for the new parent “fear-gear” aisle and pretty much fill the cart with gadgets, padding, industrial-grade airbags, and Houdini locks worried that if we didn’t cover every corner of the house…. the refrigerator might somehow get accidentally pulled over and kill the entire neighborhood.
How were we to know? The packages they came in or some article we read might of sited some study that proved “million’s of baby’s” were tragically killed from falling refrigerators on the Fourth of July.
It wasn’t until we gained experience with our first and couldn’t open anything ourselves for actual use or enjoyment, and looked like we ran a padded home for crazy people, that we realize how truly stupid those things were.
Now a bit wiser in the ways of parenthood, I realize now that there’s only really one true way to babyproof a house:
Use lots of duct tape.