Andrea’s Weblog

Is it possible to be one step ahead of a baby who thinks she has free reign of the house? I’m not certain that it is. For instance, I thought we had the cats’ food bowl out of reach. That is, until she swiped it off the desk and overturned it onto the open window sill. I guess the kitties will be dining alfresco today. I also hadn’t realized that she would be strong enough to knock over our speaker tower. As I watched her navigate around the TV, she bent down to try and push a button on the DVD player and her butt knocked the speaker over (creating a gouge in the wall).

I’ve spent more time childproofing than I can add up. Those little childproof latches for cabinet doors are a pain to install. You have to drill in two screws for the receiver side and two for the latch on the door. In a perfect world, there would be a template to follow so everything would line up properly, but every cabinet is different and the doors aren’t perfectly aligned on each one. I didn’t expect this task would prove so frustrating, especially to someone who takes pride in her “handywoman” skills.

I haven’t figured out how to keep her out of our sliding door cabinet where the radio lives. Yesterday I was listening to NPR and she turned the channel to a rock station and turned up the volume! I bought a childproofing kit for sliding doors but it won’t work on these doors.

Then there are the stairs. Last week she decided to conquer the stairs. I was eating breakfast and looked up only to see her at eye-level climbing the stairs. On her first go, she climbed 2/3 of the way and then came back down 1/3 of the way. I couldn’t believe it. I have since made two trips to the baby store trying to find a gate that will work at the foot or our stairs.

She is clearly becoming more and more mobile. She’s switched from the groundhog style (crawl, pull up on something, see something on other side of table, crawl to it, pull up, repeat) to cruising. Cruising is the official term for walking around objects while using them for support. The first time I witnessed her do this, I was sitting on the potty and she walked around the toilet to experiment with the flusher. Fortunately, she didn’t figure out how to flush the toilet (yet). It’s so fun watching her explore her world!