Baby proofing...

I've already wrote about my dislike towards baby proofing and how I'd rather be doing a bazillion other things than spending my time screwing in latches and tucking away wires. Well, that was the first and last weekend we baby proofed. Then, well, Mateo decided he wanted to crawl, and well, yeah, we had to finish.

After my husband told my co-worker that we were basically finished with baby proofing except putting up two more gates, I realized that unless I finished the baby proofing, no baby proofing would occur. That is, until Mateo totally hurt himself by opening a drawer or cabinet door and knocking something on his head.

(Side note: Last Saturday I asked my husband to watch Mateo for tops 5 minutes while I used the bathroom. Mateo was in his room, which is fairly harmless, but does still need to be tidied up for his safety. To seconds after I closed the bathroom door, I heard a crash and then a loud wail. When I went back in, I found out that Mateo had pulled all this stuff off of the bookcase and onto his head. Hmmm.)

So I spent a good chunk of Sunday sweating up a storm in the kitchen, screwing in latches on all the doors and drawers while my husband took Mateo off for a visit. Granted, I told my husband to do this, but still, the point being, I finished it.

Now today when my husband was in the kitchen, putting dishes away, he asked me, "Is this broken? Why do some work and some don't?"

He was talking about the latches.

I ignored him.

A minute or two passed by.

"Did you hear me?" he asked.

I nodded.

"So that's it? Are you going to say something? Are they broken?"

"This is what I'm going to say. I spent most of my Sunday screwing in latch after latch after latch, and now I'm feeling like you're criticizing me about how I installed them, and because of that, no, I'm not going to answer you and I'm going to ignore you. If you don't like how I did it, you can change it, but you better do it quickly."

He got the point. He no longer asked me if they were broken. And by the way, they aren't. I just opened the door he had a hard time opening, and you just have to push the latch down a bit. I'm sure I could have done a better job, but I was hot and sick of baby proofing, and the point is that Mateo can't get into the cabinets now, and if we, as adults, can't figure it out either, then that's our problem.

I guaranty that the latches will not be changed.

My husband is really a blond and baby proofing is no fun.

I brought up that we should put latches on Mateo's dresser drawers and our dresser drawers (so yes, that does make about 20 or so latches to install), and my husband agreed. I also mentioned that I was kinda hesitant on putting latches in our dresser drawers because they're nice and the first "real" furniture we ever bought and well, I didn't really want them to get wrecked.

My husband said we can use the things we bought for door knobs and then the furniture won't get wrecked.

"You mean the one that looks like this," and I made a figure eight in the air.

"Yeah, that," he said.

For demonstration purposes, I'll include a picture:



"Um, that's not going to work," I said.

He looked confused.

"They're drawers. If we put those on the knobs, then Mateo can just use the lock thing to pull open the drawers."

"Oh yeah," my husband said and laughed. His black hair with tons of salt began to change to a platinum blond color.

So far, we have two bathrooms done and a utility closet door done. Yes, we're taking this slow. Mostly cause I got annoyed that I started it and it was tedious and no fun and I wanted my husband to finish it up. So he did the other bathroom and that was that.

We also bought some pretty useless stuff, including the item pictured above since we have no cabinet drawers with knobs, but we do have two swinging open closet doors, but the knobs are too far away from each other to make the lock useful. We also bought these top lock things that slide on the top of said swinging open closet doors that don't work at all. We bought outlet things, but then I realized that we have to screw them onto the faceplate of the outlets that don't get used too often, which are basically none, so that's going back to the store too.

All in all, baby proofing stinks, and yes, we should have started this a long time ago considering we've only installed latches on 7 doors so far and have a bazillion more to do. Not to mention the power strip covers for the million power strips we seem to have. And the litter box we still haven't decided what to do with since Mateo is now taking his baths in the big bathroom and having a big litter box in there plus him and me and an inflatable bathtub is just not an option.

I think it's time to pack up and move to Oregon or Washington, like we plan to do within the next 5 years. More room sounds just about a slice of heaven right now.

I can think of 50 others thing I'd rather be doing....

Baby proofing is not one of them. It took me about a half an hour to install three latches on three doors. Only 20 more doors to go...or so it seems.