Baby-Proofing a house!
Discussion
Rowan138 said:
children are naturally inquisitive and at some point it will happen!
Interesting actually. I remember as a child I found that my dad had a small screwdriver which had a bulb in the handle and a wire with a crocodile clip on the end of it. Naturally, I wanted to see what was what. So, I plugged a plug into a socket, but only halfway. I then donned a pair iof rubber gloves and placed the clip onto one of the pins, then touched the other pin with the end of thew screwdriver...A bit of a bang, a bit of smoke and the bulb blew. Left a nice black mark on the socket too.I'd probably not want Chilli Jnr to repeat this.
Chilli said:
Kudos said:
Have you a pool? A colleague lost his son when he wandered off and fell into it aged 4 while on holidays. One of the most tragic things I heard in my life
Yeah, we have. Not a railing/fence in sight either. You can't, honestly, can't keep kidlet in sight for every second - and with a pool, unlike dog etc, it really does only take a second - no noise or fuss to get your attention quickly or help you find them if they're in difficulty.
I know one person whose child died and another whose kid is now 14 with a severe brain injury as a result of a near drowning aged 2.
BlackVanDyke said:
I take it back, that's the one single thing you really do need to sort out before baby is mobile. (at all - mate's son could crawl fast by about 7 months, don't wait until s/he can walk
First job I did when my wife found out we were expecting was to fill in the pond in our back garden and gave away all my fish to a friend. 
Those pool accidents sound horrendous.
We've been fairly relaxed about child proofing out house and it's worked very well (touch wood). My wife is a trained nurse/mid wife and I suppose having seen a lot of neurotic parents over the years is the opposite. We have one gate on our living room door which was a pull across "blind" so you didn't trip over the thing and didn't stop the proper door being used. It's really not been used that much. We had no locks on our kitchen draws and no other stair gates. Our kids are now 3 1/2 and 18 months and we've not had any emergencies. I think if the kids were closer together you probably would need more safety stuff....by the time our second was mobile our eldest was able to go up and down stairs and knew what was and wasn't allowed to be played with.
A kid is only ever going to go in the kitchen cupboard looking for chemicals if it's bored....so make sure they're safely amused/stimulated.
There are plenty of baby gym/play pen type things on the market if you need to imobilise a nine month old baby for five or ten minutes.
We've been fairly relaxed about child proofing out house and it's worked very well (touch wood). My wife is a trained nurse/mid wife and I suppose having seen a lot of neurotic parents over the years is the opposite. We have one gate on our living room door which was a pull across "blind" so you didn't trip over the thing and didn't stop the proper door being used. It's really not been used that much. We had no locks on our kitchen draws and no other stair gates. Our kids are now 3 1/2 and 18 months and we've not had any emergencies. I think if the kids were closer together you probably would need more safety stuff....by the time our second was mobile our eldest was able to go up and down stairs and knew what was and wasn't allowed to be played with.
A kid is only ever going to go in the kitchen cupboard looking for chemicals if it's bored....so make sure they're safely amused/stimulated.
There are plenty of baby gym/play pen type things on the market if you need to imobilise a nine month old baby for five or ten minutes.
We filled in the pond, put a stairgate on top & bottom, plugged in socjet covers & shoved all the bleach into the top cupboard. That was about it. Logically you do want them to hurt themselves up to a point so they learn, but only up to a point. We found the worst thing was clumping them round the nut on door frames carrying them when they were little. Did that a few times & still get the odd guilty spasm now when I think back.
The point is you can't protect them 24 hours a day, life gets in the way of it. You should do what you can but within reason. It's always a balance between protection and letting them get on with it. But I would always fill in a pond. That's a terrible, terrible thing when a child drowns.
The point is you can't protect them 24 hours a day, life gets in the way of it. You should do what you can but within reason. It's always a balance between protection and letting them get on with it. But I would always fill in a pond. That's a terrible, terrible thing when a child drowns.
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