Adventures in Baby-proofing

Before last week, I foolishly thought extensive baby-proofing was the domain of paranoid, neat freak, posh, uber organized parents (I’m ashamed to admit the word “posh” is in my vocabulary).  I had simply been following Amelia around the house, shuffling potential dangers out of the way.  We had set up a mini play zone in the living room for when I can’t follow Amelia around, plugged up the sockets, and called it a baby-proofing day.

Kaiya has even been trained, accidentally, to move when Amelia grabs her tail or lunges towards her.  This maneuver never stops being funny.  A giggling Amelia grabs Kaiya’s nose and Kaiya jumps up on her creaky old dog legs, looks at me like I’ve ruined her life, and runs into the next room.  I know she does this because when Amelia first came home, I made Kaiya move whenever she tried to lick Amelia’s head off.  I’m both proud of Kaiya for internalizing my commands and a little sad I’ve made her afraid of the big bad baby monster known as Amelia poopy pants.  Overall, Kaiya’s new timidity and my hawk like mommy eyes had made me complacent.

But then Amelia’s crawling, amazingly, moved into baby warp speed.  Suddenly, all my misplaced preconceived notions about baby-proofing came crashing down as just another Meredith opinion based on very little actual experience.  Motherhood has been an endlessly humbling journey.

Amelia’s new favorite game is called find the most dangerous object in the room and try to eat it.  Our little house now feels like a treacherous war zone.  I had never realized how many stupid cords we use to plug in our energy sucking computers, wireless routers, television, lamps, guitar hero.  I had a plugged in shredder sitting on the ground in the guest room.  A shredder!  Am I insane?  All my podcasting equipment still calls that room home, so we keep the door closed, but the shredder had to go anyhow.

Amelia also finds Kaiya’s food and water dishes hilarious, and she has discovered the joy of taking all the books off our bookshelves, itself not as annoying as I thought it would be, yet I had a horrible dream about a crashing bookshelf and little baby legs peaking out ala the Wizard of Oz.  I finally asked Dave how we stabilize these inanimate monsters.  That is on our to do list.

I decided the crockpot, blender, and attachments to the food processor probably shouldn’t be in the lowest cupboard.  Dave has taken to keeping some of his straight razors on a low shelf in the bathroom, so that room is officially off limits.  What kind of people are we?  Straight razors and shredders.  Are we trying to make a low budget baby horror movie?  Needless to say, I’ve turned into the paranoid, wannabe neat freak, still not posh, slightly organized parent.