Clearly he is gifted.
This morning I was on the phone in the living room, and he came in the room with a bottle of carpet cleaner in one hand, and a bottle of Clorox Clean Up in his mouth.
In. His. Mouth.
I've stuck wooden spoons in the handles, and that thwarted him for a little while, but he figured out how to remove those last night. For now, this is my elegant solution:
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| When it's 99 degrees outside and you sit on your phone to keep your baby from throwing it, sometimes you make steam between the case and the lens. |
Zip ties. We'll just have to cut them when we need to get into the cabinet.
I sure know how to fancy up the joint, don't I?
It's a good thing kids are so stinkin' cute at this age (18 months), because you have to watch them like a hawk to keep them alive. Other favorite activities include:
- Standing on the dining room table (maybe I could zip tie the chairs together?)
- Throwing things behind the couch (at one point, before I discovered this, four of the five phones we have in the house were behind the couch)
- Jumping on the dog (maybe I could zip tie her mouth shut?)
- Trying to open the front door (locking the screen works. For now)
- Bashing people over the head with toys (he has gotten both sisters in the past hour)
- Playing with the water in the toilet (keeping the bathroom door shut keeps him out of it, for now)
- Putting tiny things in his mouth (I swear, if the girls' toys get any smaller we're going to need a microscope to play with them. The people who invented Polly Pockets, Littlest Pet Shop, etc. obviously invented them for their youngest kids)
- Climbing up the couch to look out the front window, which would be fine except that sometimes he goes too far and falls behind the couch. On his head. And of course, of course, I can't reach him back there, so I have to coax his screaming head out. Maybe we need to rearrange the furniture or put a trampoline behind there or something.
9 comments:
Eye hooks placed as high up as you can reach. $3 for a set of two at your local hardware store. Won't work on cabinets but work great on bathroom/closet/screen doors. My youngest can open locked doors with those "childproof" covers on them... then get into the bathroom and empty Excedrin all over the counter. He will be the death of me.
Eek! Gross! Ewwwwww...
Happy Parenting!
LOVE the zip ties - such a fashion statement! Before you know it he will be weilding a pair of scissors so he can get to all those wonderful bad for him things again.
I actually just snorted with laughter. He is all boy my friend! We just rearranged the living room so that the 15 month old, who is a climber monkey from hell, wouldn't scale the couch and go over the half-wall above our stairs to the basement.
I'm sorry, but it is funny. I love the zip ties - good idea & lovely, too.
Toilet latches. And hasps on kitchen cabinets with a padlock. Looks like s*** but at least I know my kids won't poison themselves. (I moved all the scary stuff into one cabinet so we only needed to mess up one cabinet.) A lockbox (like for cash) for the small medicines. The hooks and eyes on doors are fantastic. Just make it a rule they can never climb up on chairs near those doors. We also have the knob covers on those scary doors -- even though they can defeat them, it slows them down enough for me to arrive.
And really childproofing is a pain in the neck, but it's such peace of mind. And when my son got really sick last week, and the docs were trying to figure out what was wrong, it was so nice to tell them he couldn't possibly have gotten into anything (because it's all locked, high, or both). And that helped to eliminate a couple possiblities. (And he's fine now and we think we have a good idea what happened to him.)
As for falling behind the couch, can you move it closer to the wall? Or move it somewhere where it will be less tempting to him to climb on it?
The trouble is, I can't do anything that will prevent the girls from being able to use the bathroom... So hooks and eyes are out. I'm afraid *I* would have accidents if we had toilet latches! Those things confound me. The girls are really good about closing the door behind themselves. The main bathroom problems happen when we have playdates and our guests don't know our rules! :)
The couch is an enormous sectional, and it's in the only place that it fits in this tiny house. It has to have a certain amount of clearance between it and the wall (the wall on the other side has owies where it has been bumped).
I've got all the medicine up high. I think I'm going to just have to move all the cleaning supplies to the cabinet over the washer until he grows some sense.
What happened to your son? I'm glad he's ok.
My son was throwing up for 24 hours & got really dehydrated really fast & had to be airlifted to the regional pediatric ICU. His blood test results were terrible -- one thing that could have made them look like that was aspirin poisoning, so it was good to know he couldn't have gotten into any medicines. We (and the docs) think his allergies flared & made him throw up.
For the bathroom, if the girls are good, maybe you could put a sign on the bathroom door when you have playdates, asking people to shut the door behind them when they are done.
We have hooks & eyes on the laundry room, the furnace room, and the hall closet where we keep first aid supplies. Medicine goes in a lockbox on a high closet shelf.
Wow, that's scary. I'm really glad he's ok.
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