What Do My Favorite Glass Baking Dish and My Internet Connection Have in Common?

We have child locks on all of our kitchen cabinets. These are essential equipment in our house to keep our children out of our kitchen paraphernalia. Without these locks, the kids will throw plastic storage containers all over the house, store our plastic mixing bowls with their toys, and literally beat our pots and pans like a drum. With these locks in place, the doors stay shut, the equipment stays put away, and the kids stay in the hunt for something to play with.

Unlike the baby gate that the boys can already climb over, I know these cabinet locks will remain useful for as long as I need them because they’re almost impossible for an adult to open. To open, a user must push and hold a button on the front and a button on the side while simultaneously pulling on the locking strap. This maneuver needs the dexterity and size of adult hands, or the possession of a third hand, so these locks should hold until the kids start cooperating to open them.

The problem with these locks is I don’t want to put forth the effort to open them unless necessary. In my mind, putting away freshly washed dishes falls short of the “necessary” plateau. I can just stack them on the countertop above the cabinet, which is above the kids’ grasp, and put them away the next time I open the cabinet to pull out a dish. Of course this leads to many dishes being stacked on the countertop, and since I can just pluck a clean dish from the countertop when needed, I wind up rarely opening the cabinet to put anything away.

As of yesterday, my favorite glass baking dish had sat on the countertop for a week. As a parent of three small children, I rarely bake so I had no reason to use it. I didn’t need to put it away either since it was out of the way and out of mind. So there it sat, mostly forgotten, waiting for one of my bi-monthly cleaning urges when I open the cabinets for the express purpose of storing all those collected dishes.


The countertop is at least four feet off the ground, well outside the reach of my children when they’re standing on the floor. Unfortunately, my children know how to drag a chair to the countertop to extend their reach. That’s how Tory was exploring the countertop yesterday, standing on a chair, searching for soda pop cans, fallen food crumbs, shiny objects, or anything else that catches his interest.

Whatever caught his interest yesterday also caught the baking dish. He grabbed something, pulled it toward him, and knocked the dish off the countertop. I was dimly aware that he was standing on a chair at the time; I considered his action to be more “annoying” than “dangerous,” so I stayed focused on keeping the house running. I became very aware of his actions when I heard the glass dish shatter on the floor.

This is (was) a large dish that shattered into many pieces varying in size from “foot slicer” to “foot embedder.” As my children refuse to wear any foot coverings, I immediately banished everyone to their rooms while I spent too many minutes cleaning every last grain of glass.

No one was hurt in the incident. The dish was destroyed, but the important thing was everyone’s feet were intact. It gave me an interesting story to tell, which I meant to share earlier, but my Internet connection has been broken for the past couple of days. If I don’t post again soon, just assume my Internet connection is down. Either that, or the kids found something really big to break and I don’t have time to post after cleaning it.