Adventures in Babyproofing

Alexander takes babyproofing as a challenge. He easily figured out how to pull the outlet covers from the sockets. He brings them to us, beaming.

He's also figured out how to move chairs around so he can climb on tables, open drawers in the kitchen, and pull the coffee pot from the coffee maker (fortunately a cold pot we hadn't emptied yet). I'm sure you'll agree that the coffee really adds a certain something to the decor:



You might have also noticed how well the cabinet lock has worked for us. Here's a closer look at how Alexander is working his away around that little babyproofing device:



Oh, and here's what's left of the device that was supposed to keep him from opening the oven door:



Now, I know what you're thinking: Keep this kid out of the kitchen, right? And it just so happens that we have a big gate to keep him in the family room. Well, we had a big gate. First he tore it from the wall.



Then he actually broke the gate itself:



I'm thinking maybe we contact the manufacturer about this one. Seems to me, a baby just shouldn't be able to break their gate, am I right? Pulling it out of the wall, well, that's probably faulty mounting. The wall is concrete, and that's surprisingly difficult to mount into, and so enough persistent shaking of the gate eventually crumbled the concrete. In retrospect, we can see a better way to mount it, but that doesn't help much now.

I finally figured out a way to babyproof the laptop, to make it so he could press all the keys and they wouldn't do anything but make funny noises. So we let him at it one day:



The problem, of course, is that I couldn't lock the touchpad and its buttons as well as the keys. So I come back in the room to find him opening Microsoft Outlook, checking my business e-mail. Apparently, he even sent a chat message to our friend Jennifer.

So what can we do but keep him busy? While Darrick fixed dinner, he kept him occupied with stirring the juice. Alexander took the task quite seriously.



We can also get some peace while he plays endlessly with the water dispenser on the fridge. Here, he's mighty thirsty after shooting an episode of COPS.



Oh, and we put the piano bench in my office because he was using it to climb onto the keys, then on top of the piano. Now he uses his dad as a bench.



Seems that we need to keep him safe by taking him out of the house, so today, we tried yet another park. This one has a pool, which we'll go back to as soon as I get a suit.