"There's a world where I can go and tell my secrets to..."
I trust Abbie to stay out of trouble when she’s in her room unsupervised. I have to trust her if I want her to sleep. If I left her room door open to keep an eye on her, she wouldn’t fall asleep until collapsing on the kitchen floor shortly before sunrise after a wild night of chasing pets and gorging on sugar-sweetened fluorescent-colored cereal. Then she’d wake up a couple hours later still tired, cranky, and in desperate need of more Fruit Rings for an energy boost.
This trust requires planning on my part since Abbie tends to get into everything within her reach, and almost everything lower than ceiling light fixture is within her reach. I have to remove anything dangerous in her room, and I believe I’ve done that, at least until she figures out how to remove the safety covers on the electrical sockets, which at the rate she defeats “childproof” devices, could be sometime next Tuesday. The only way left for her to hurt herself is by falling off furniture, but her floor is carpeted, so hopefully she wouldn’t suffer anything worse than rug burn. She could theoretically tip the changing table onto herself, but she’d have to bounce on the open drawers to supply enough force to tip it. Fortunately our changing table has built-in safety feature in that the drawers are too cheap to support her weight, a fact she uncovered by standing in and breaking one of the drawers.
Safety is the most important consideration, but I also have to watch out for the annoyance factor. Abbie still has a myriad of items within her reach that she can strew about the room if I’m not around to stop her. I’ve developed a system of elevating temptations to thwart her before shutting her door. Her basket of books goes on the changing table. She can still reach them on the changing table, but it at least discourages her from throwing them around the room and removing pages in my absence. The diaper pail also goes on the changing table, and I tip it to horizontal so she can’t stuff anything in there. Even with these steps, I have to inspect each trash bag carefully for burp clothes and stuffed animals that took an unfortunate journey to an unpleasant place.
I can’t move everything beyond her reach, though. The floor in front of her dresser is littered with theoretically clean clothes that she pulled from the dresser. She likes to look at her clothes, try putting them on, and throwing them down in frustration after failing to pull a shirtsleeve over her head.
The wipe warmer on top of the changing table is another favorite target. When I put a new package of wipes in the warmer, they’re in a beautifully folded pattern ensuring that a new one pops up each time I pull a new one out. This schematic stays intact for an average of about 15 hours before Abbie finds the warmer and dumps its contents on the floor. The result is I have to constantly stuff cold wipes back in the warmer while wondering why those clothes in front of her dresser are wet.
She also loves playing with diapers.* After tossing the wipe warmer, she moves into the diaper stackers, opening each diaper, discovering it’s empty, and tossing them on the floor on top of the clothes and wipes. I tolerated this for a while even though it made finding the correct diaper for the correct child difficult because there’s nowhere else in the room to put the diapers and still have easy access to them while various orifices are uncovered. I moved them across the room and out of her reach when I tried picking them up one morning, and found five diapers with the tabs ripped off. She pulled them off the biggest, most expensive overnight diapers, too. Those things are expensive enough that I considered taping, or possibly pinning the tabs back on before giving up and tossing their unused innards. Those lightweight dry diapers make it really tough to spot the mistakenly tossed burp clothes, too.
* Here I’m referring to the stockpile in the diaper stackers, although she is learning the joys of playing with the diaper she’s wearing.
This trust requires planning on my part since Abbie tends to get into everything within her reach, and almost everything lower than ceiling light fixture is within her reach. I have to remove anything dangerous in her room, and I believe I’ve done that, at least until she figures out how to remove the safety covers on the electrical sockets, which at the rate she defeats “childproof” devices, could be sometime next Tuesday. The only way left for her to hurt herself is by falling off furniture, but her floor is carpeted, so hopefully she wouldn’t suffer anything worse than rug burn. She could theoretically tip the changing table onto herself, but she’d have to bounce on the open drawers to supply enough force to tip it. Fortunately our changing table has built-in safety feature in that the drawers are too cheap to support her weight, a fact she uncovered by standing in and breaking one of the drawers.
Safety is the most important consideration, but I also have to watch out for the annoyance factor. Abbie still has a myriad of items within her reach that she can strew about the room if I’m not around to stop her. I’ve developed a system of elevating temptations to thwart her before shutting her door. Her basket of books goes on the changing table. She can still reach them on the changing table, but it at least discourages her from throwing them around the room and removing pages in my absence. The diaper pail also goes on the changing table, and I tip it to horizontal so she can’t stuff anything in there. Even with these steps, I have to inspect each trash bag carefully for burp clothes and stuffed animals that took an unfortunate journey to an unpleasant place.
I can’t move everything beyond her reach, though. The floor in front of her dresser is littered with theoretically clean clothes that she pulled from the dresser. She likes to look at her clothes, try putting them on, and throwing them down in frustration after failing to pull a shirtsleeve over her head.
The wipe warmer on top of the changing table is another favorite target. When I put a new package of wipes in the warmer, they’re in a beautifully folded pattern ensuring that a new one pops up each time I pull a new one out. This schematic stays intact for an average of about 15 hours before Abbie finds the warmer and dumps its contents on the floor. The result is I have to constantly stuff cold wipes back in the warmer while wondering why those clothes in front of her dresser are wet.
She also loves playing with diapers.* After tossing the wipe warmer, she moves into the diaper stackers, opening each diaper, discovering it’s empty, and tossing them on the floor on top of the clothes and wipes. I tolerated this for a while even though it made finding the correct diaper for the correct child difficult because there’s nowhere else in the room to put the diapers and still have easy access to them while various orifices are uncovered. I moved them across the room and out of her reach when I tried picking them up one morning, and found five diapers with the tabs ripped off. She pulled them off the biggest, most expensive overnight diapers, too. Those things are expensive enough that I considered taping, or possibly pinning the tabs back on before giving up and tossing their unused innards. Those lightweight dry diapers make it really tough to spot the mistakenly tossed burp clothes, too.
* Here I’m referring to the stockpile in the diaper stackers, although she is learning the joys of playing with the diaper she’s wearing.
posted by Matt at
11:37 PM
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