Yesterday I watched as Davey rolled over onto his belly and with sheer determination and a few grunts, placed his hands in front of him and pushed himself up, while also putting pressure on his knees.   I was quiet and held my breath as I was afraid my excitement over seeing him do this on his own would scare him thus causing him to lose his concentration and fall over.   This was a milestone and while I was super proud of my little prodigy, I didn’t want to overwhelm him.

As I continued to watch him, he started to rock back and forth.   He reminded me of one of those old matchbox cars that you would rev up before letting it go.  It would then rip and roar across the floor, its path completely indeterminate.  Davey was revving up, I was convinced of it.  Too bad he was in his pack and play, which meant he wasn’t going far.   Of course within a matter of a couple of minutes, he seemed to lose all strength and fall over.   At that point, he wasn’t interested in trying again.   But even with that little step, I still didn’t manage to consider the fact that the day when I would need to baby proof the house is just right around the corner.   Today, reality definitely dug in deep.

Davey and I had our first playdate at our house.   He is the youngest of the babies, by at least 6 months.   All the other babies are either crawling or walking so of course these other mommies have their house already set to go.   I quickly learned that 1) if I want another playdate at our house, then I need to baby proof and 2) I may need to baby proof it even sooner at the rate Davey is going.

I suppose I’ve held off on getting the house ready for a number of reasons, but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you the main reason is because I’m afraid my husband and I won’t be able to get into our cabinets! 

I’m taking baby steps in making the house kid friendly.   For example, I do have a box of clear plug protectors to put into all the electrical outlets.  Thing is, though, I wasn’t really anticipating how many I would need.   There is an outlet on every wall of our house and in some cases two!   I thought the outlets were awesome and would come in handy when we built the house.   Guess I wasn’t exactly thinking about babies at that point.  I’ve already gone through my one box of protectors and that only took care of one outlet in the kitchen, two in the morning room and one in the game room!  Good  grief. 

My next step, which again is not something I thought about when we built our house, is our rock fireplace and hearth.   The darn thing has so many jagged edges that the slightest touch could cause a person to bleed to death.   I think I was sweating bullets more over the kids banging their heads on that as opposed to the electrical outlets.   I was frantically running through our home owners insurance in my head and the money we had saved and our net worth in the event that one of the kids from Davey’s play group bumped their head and my husband and I were sued.  Overexaggerating?  Possibly, but this is how my mind rolls.

The last step I can think of is the one most difficult for me and that is the latches on the cabinet doors.   I’m trying to hold off on those as long as possible.   I can’t even operate the one in the church nursery, so I don’t even want to think about having a safety latch on EVERY door on the cupboards!   The insanity of it all!   And what’s worse, my self-deprecating personality will seriously malfunction when I can’t operate the latches and I remind myself that I have 3 college degrees, one of which is a Masters!  Ugh, I think I just got a pain in my chest thinking about that.

We also have stairs, so I need to make sure that I have protected all the little ones from trying to climb up them.  This is so exhausting!  I already feel like I’m running around frantically and Davey isn’t even crawling yet!

So, for all you other mommies out there who are in the same boat as me and wonder just what you need to do, I’m attaching a link from one of my favorite websites, Babycenter. 

http://www.babycenter.com/0_childproofing-around-the-house_460.bc

Good luck to all you out there.