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04.25.08
Babyproofing In 11 Easy Steps
posted by Absinthe | 10:51 AM
The child is becoming more mobile. As we live in a place that’s practically a deathtrap for ourselves, I’ve devoted considerable thought to how best to make it - or any living space - into a suitable environment for child “development”, otherwise known as maintaining metabolic viability. All of this careful thought has revealed to me a process that should work for anyone. Here it is:
1. Obtain a credit card. This is very important. Ideally the credit card is not yours.
2. Multiply the number of doors in your home by two; add to this the number of other things in your home that can theoretically be opened, including cabinets, bottles and small animals. Multiply this sum by the number of potential fire sources in your home, again including small animals. Multiply this subtotal by your desired household safety rating on a scale from one to five, bearing in mind that the life expectancy of a mobile toddler in a three-star-or-less environment is measured in minutes. Write this total down on a piece of paper. Do not lose the piece of paper.
3. Look at the number on the piece of paper. If the number is greater than 100, drink. If not, continue to stare at the flickering shadows on the unadorned walls of your cave.
4. Look at the number again. Pop quiz time! Is the number:
a. roughly equal to the number of nice things you will not be buying for yourself, your spouse or significant other within the next decade;
b. less than half of what a babyproofing expert would charge you to make your environment baby-tolerable;
c. hey, what about all this stuff on the shelves? Where are you supposed to put stuff that normally goes on shelves?
5. Forget about the paper for a moment and get down on all fours so you can view the world from your child’s perspective. Look for things you might conceivably use to kill yourself located at or near eye level. Probably you have already begun doing this, or at least thinking about it. Remember to make it look like an accident!
6. Look at the number on the paper again. If you are very, very lucky, you can babyproof your house for slightly less than that in real, actual dollars, that you will never stand any chance of recouping. Kiss it goodbye.
7. Remember the credit card? Get it out, find a website that sells babyproofing gear, and order several hundred dollars’ worth. Hope that the delivery is prompt because your child is growing every day.
8. When the gear arrives, come to the realization that the primary effect of the influx of several hundred dollars’ worth of baby gear on the average residence is to make the environment hazardous for adults as well as toddlers. Get used to leaving the lights on 24/7 until you find a way to assimilate everything. Oh, right, electricity. You know what fits neatly into the ground plug socket? A child’s finger, that’s what. Probably should make that a priority.
9. Consider the following paradox: the mounting hardware of so-called safety gates requires access to tools of such lethality that their mutual presence on the property is zero-sum.
10. Settle for establishing one baby-safe zone in your home, buttressed with pillows, couch cushions and reasonably intact sandbags. Begin selling off your worldly goods. Move to cave. Repeat process from the beginning until the number on the paper from step 2 is indeed less than 100.
11. Rediscover fire.
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Topics: Experiments In Terror, Human Interests, Impending Parenthood |
April 25, 2008 at 11:21 AM
Nice to see that full blown paranoia has not fully set in. Does that happen when your child is driving, or before?
Oh wait, I don’t have kids and my number was 7 digits. Time to get drunk. It is Friday, after all.
April 26, 2008 at 12:38 PM
It gets easier, not cheaper but WAY easier. Give a bunch of factual|hwrdh love to the wife and baby. Viva le toddler!
April 26, 2008 at 3:23 PM
Our’s is nearly four, and we have yet to fully “babyproof” this house. We got so busy chasing his ass around that we ran out of time.
What’s really fun is when you have visitors, particularly grandparents. Watching adults try to open doors, cabinets and refrigerators with child locks on them is freaking HILARIOUS. It annoys the hell out of them, because of course, when we were children, every house was a death trap.
“Our kids all lived, so what’s with all this crap?” they might ask. You might not have an answer, but you sure as hell don’t want to be the only parent of a toddler who didn’t buy all this shit.
Good luck.
May 3, 2008 at 2:59 PM
As a person who actually needed locks on upper kitchen cabinets, I know what you are going through. I recommend the SuperYard, which is the only way we could still have electricity in the house for a long time. Really, a few well-placed locks (the ones that are a PITA for you to open are the only kind that work, of course) and closed doors will do the trick for a while after D. outgrows the SuperYard.