Holly: How to Babyproof (or how not to)

Before my daughter was born my husband and I read about how to baby-proof our home. In fact, we read a lot about it. One of the suggestions that we read was that we get everything baby-proofed before the baby is even born so that you have time to get used to the way your home looks and ‘works’.

Well, we didn’t take that advice. In fact, we didn’t do much of any baby-proofing until Brett started sitting up. Then we decided it was time. One piece of advice we read about how to babyproof your home was to crawl on all fours and try pulling on things. My 6′3″ husband did this. Why didn’t I take pictures? Still, we took a modest approach. We purchased a gate to block the television (and all gadgets with it), we bought latches for our cabinets and we put plastic covers on the power outlets.

This approach seemed to work very well- until this week. You can see from this picture that Brett figured out how to move the gate to get behind it. There she is in front of the television playing with the Wii remote and DVD boxes. No harm done but it made me reevaluate what we did for safety measures.

In addition, she has figured out how to open drawers. We never had latches on the drawers but now it seems we will need them. I had to call Poison Control (again) because she opened a higher drawer (she’s taller now) and took out my deodorant, somehow scratched the deodorant off and put it in her mouth! It turns out that no harm was done by that taster of deodorant but it was still scary!

My goal this weekend is to go and purchase a few more items to help babyproof my home. Hopefully Brett doesn’t figure out how to use or get around these new purchases!

Here are a few websites I found with pointers on how to babyproof your home. Hope you find them helpful!

Baby Proofing Guide on WebMD

Baby Proofing on About.com

iVillage 17 Best Ways to Baby Proof