Q-Proofed

So now that Q has turned into a crawling machine, we’ve had to start getting serious about the baby proofing around here. We’re going for a laissez-faire approach: making sure that anything dangerous/breakable is out of reach but not keeping her out of safe places for her to explore. For instance, we’re not locking up kitchen cabinets that just have aluminum pans in them. If she wants to pull out the pans and bang on them like bongo drums, that’s fine. But we are locking up the china, cleaning supplies, etc.

(Q is demonstrating by opening and closing the basket where we keep firewood as I type this.)

The only real hassle here is that my house was not designed for modern babyproofing. My office is on a lower level, so we have to keep the door closed now so Q doesn’t face plant in there every time she’s trying to get to Mommy. Installing gates on our banistered staircase was a long fun afternoon.

This weekend, I tackled the kitchen cabinets. I was most interested in locking up our under sink cabinet, which holds all our nasty chemicals. Though we could move the nasty chemicals, I worry about her potentially crawling around in there, given the pipes and wires and water-filter cords and switch for the garbage disposal. Closing it off is the most efficient and safest solution.

But not, as it turned out, the easiest. Since this was a single cabinet instead of double doors, a lock like this wouldn’t work:

So first I tried these little babies:

No go. These locks require you to open the cabinet partway, then stick your finger in and depress the latch so it releases. Which sounds great, until you realize that the lip of my countertop goes too far over the edge of the cabinet for me to get my finger inside:

Then I tried one of these, figuring i could thread it through the cabinet and attach it to the drawer on the right.

But the angle thwarted me. I could thread it just fine, but I couldn’t figure out how I could get it to release and re-snap given the acute angle I was dealing with (it appears designed to go around the outside corners of ovens or refrigerators, not the inside corners of cabinets.

Hmmm, what to do. At this point, I was getting a little frustrated. I’d spent Q’s entire naptime trying to solve this dilemma (rather than, say, reading one of the many, many new books calling my name). This is also when Sailor Boy suggested simply tying the cabinet drawers shut, to which I responded “Spoken like someone who never has to go in there to retrieve any of the cooking implements.”

Okay. A lot frustrated.

Which is when I got this brainwave:

I attached the fixed side to the underside of the cabinet (Google tells me this is called the “toe space.”) Now, I can unlatch it whenever I need to open it, and it’s VERY unobtrusive. In fact, when I sent Sailor Boy to see my solution, he didn’t even notice it at first!

Great. Problem solved. I spent the rest of her naptime doing simpler things, such as covering electrical outlets.

We still have to resolve a few more cabinet issues, bolt the TV to the wall, and put in a second gate at the top of the stairs. But hey! Progress!