"If you haven't asked your parent's permission, naughty-naughty! But Krusty forgives you."
Abbie is now hitting the point where she has some bad habits that we really need to stop. At first, she could make us happy just by showing some initiative to move on her own. “Oh look,” we might say, “Abbie is standing all by herself. How cute. Now she’s playing with the glass doors on the entertainment center, wildly swinging them open and slamming them shut. Awwwwww.” Now the novelty is gone, and it seems like every time I turn my head she wanders off to do something naughty.
Since she’s too young to understand anything more complicated than “Abbie,” I suppose the way to stop bad behaviors is to limit her access. We easily secured the entertainment center doors with a rubber band stretched across the doorknobs out of her reach. Now when she pulls on the doors, she quickly realizes that she can’t play with the doors or the exciting electronic equipment behind the doors. The only downside for us is removing and replacing the rubber band can be quite a pain when we need to open the doors to watch a movie, but Abbie helps us with that by keeping us too busy to ever watch a movie again.
Thwarted by a rubber band on the entertainment center, she’ll move on to something else she shouldn’t touch, like the marine fish tank*. This tank’s stand is mostly enclosed with a single glass door for access. Hidden inside the stand are all of the electrical wires, food, and highly toxic chemicals needed to keep healthy fish, or, to put it another way, lots of stuff we don’t want in her mouth. There’s nothing to attach rubber bands to here, so instead I placed a large bucket weighted down with salt in front of the door. That ends a lot of my worries since in order to play with the door and everything behind it, she’d first have to move two to four times her weight in salt, which she can’t do, but if she could lift something that heavy, I’d probably have much bigger things to worry about.
Then there’s the dog food. I feel that I’ve mined that forest dry, so for more discussion of Abbie’s fixation on dog food, see just about any previous post. I now completely remove the dog’s food dish when Abbie is awake and roaming the house. That effectively prevents any temptations she might have to munch on a few kibbles. It also prevents the dog from eating most of the day, forcing her to subsist for excruciatingly long intervals on nothing but forsaken Tasteeos flung from the highchair.
That pretty much takes care of Abbie-proofing the living room. Now there’s absolutely no way Abbie can get in trouble in the living room. Unless maybe she tries to discover what happens when a Weeble hits the television screen**. Or what happens when a Weeble hits the china cabinet***. So everyone is safe, at least until she performs the cute action of climbing on furniture.
* We have two large (55 and 72 gallon) fish tanks, but the only one she’s ever messed with is the bigger marine tank. She’s never shown any desire to mess with the smaller freshwater tank, even though it’s in her room. Maybe that’s because it’s on a completely open wrought-iron stand without a glass door to entice her.
** Answer: Probably not much.
*** Answer: Daddy and especially mommy cry.
Since she’s too young to understand anything more complicated than “Abbie,” I suppose the way to stop bad behaviors is to limit her access. We easily secured the entertainment center doors with a rubber band stretched across the doorknobs out of her reach. Now when she pulls on the doors, she quickly realizes that she can’t play with the doors or the exciting electronic equipment behind the doors. The only downside for us is removing and replacing the rubber band can be quite a pain when we need to open the doors to watch a movie, but Abbie helps us with that by keeping us too busy to ever watch a movie again.
Thwarted by a rubber band on the entertainment center, she’ll move on to something else she shouldn’t touch, like the marine fish tank*. This tank’s stand is mostly enclosed with a single glass door for access. Hidden inside the stand are all of the electrical wires, food, and highly toxic chemicals needed to keep healthy fish, or, to put it another way, lots of stuff we don’t want in her mouth. There’s nothing to attach rubber bands to here, so instead I placed a large bucket weighted down with salt in front of the door. That ends a lot of my worries since in order to play with the door and everything behind it, she’d first have to move two to four times her weight in salt, which she can’t do, but if she could lift something that heavy, I’d probably have much bigger things to worry about.
Then there’s the dog food. I feel that I’ve mined that forest dry, so for more discussion of Abbie’s fixation on dog food, see just about any previous post. I now completely remove the dog’s food dish when Abbie is awake and roaming the house. That effectively prevents any temptations she might have to munch on a few kibbles. It also prevents the dog from eating most of the day, forcing her to subsist for excruciatingly long intervals on nothing but forsaken Tasteeos flung from the highchair.
That pretty much takes care of Abbie-proofing the living room. Now there’s absolutely no way Abbie can get in trouble in the living room. Unless maybe she tries to discover what happens when a Weeble hits the television screen**. Or what happens when a Weeble hits the china cabinet***. So everyone is safe, at least until she performs the cute action of climbing on furniture.
* We have two large (55 and 72 gallon) fish tanks, but the only one she’s ever messed with is the bigger marine tank. She’s never shown any desire to mess with the smaller freshwater tank, even though it’s in her room. Maybe that’s because it’s on a completely open wrought-iron stand without a glass door to entice her.
** Answer: Probably not much.
*** Answer: Daddy and especially mommy cry.
posted by Matt at
9:36 PM
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