Babyproof!

In the last couple of weeks, as Kisa has started to crawl, I have felt a growing urgency to remove every single object from our living room as I have caught her getting into (among other things) catnip, video games, power cords, and chunks of old baby food stuck to our kitchen floor.

When it comes to the subject of babyproofing, I have received all kinds of advice, from "remove all items but toys from your living room" to "don't change a thing, they need to learn how to live in the world". While I appreciate all the advice, I find both "camps" to be a little too extreme for my liking. While I have no immediate desire to turn my home into an Ode to Baby, I also think it is rather unfair to expect Kisa to immediately adapt to all of our desires. After all, there are three people living in this home, and my feeling is that we all have a right to live in a space that we find comfortable, beautiful and most of all: safe. Our bedrooms should be a place just for us, but the common rooms should be a compromise. Which means, at least temporarily, some minor changes need to be made to accommodate our curious (and surprisingly mobile) 8-month-old.


I spent the better part of today crawling around our living and dining room trying to assess possible dangers (Kisa has already done a GREAT job of finding most of them for me). I have a few items on my to-do list, but in general I think I have identified and solved most of the immediate concerns in our main living space.

The biggest thing for me is going to be trying to keep our floors as clean as possible. In a relatively short period of time Kisa went from sitting happily on her blanket to rolling/crawling all over the place, and it has been a reminder of my failure to clean as well as I should. Matt and I are pretty neat people, and we like to keep our place tidy, but as far as cleanliness goes, it has taken a real nosedive since Kisa was born. Soooo I'm going to have to add sweeping, mopping and vacuuming back to my list of regular tasks. I'm no germophobe (my parents are laughing right now if they are reading this), but I can't describe to you how disgusting it is to see your baby trying to lick up old, dried food that has been stuck under the high chair from the night before.

Anyway, one of my current goals as a parent is to try to let Kisa explore her world as completely as possible. I don't want to always be telling her no, or taking things from her, or taking her away from an object she is exploring. As long as she is safe, I want to be able to support her learning about the world she lives in. Which is why I have decided to (at least partially) do some babyproofing- so that I can be confident that our house is an okay place for her to explore without, you know, contracting some sick disease from her leftover squash.