Every morning, Kalina rushes to her toy bin and empties it out. She spends the rest of the day strewing the litter as widely across the house as possible. She then does the same with her diaper bin, supply bin, other toy bin and any laundry baskets she can get her cute little hands on before she starts in on our bookshelves. This takes her about 10 minutes.When her stuff is equally distributed throughout every room in an even layer, the real fun begins as she starts pulling up and falling over.
When she's tired of that, she chases after various garbage cans, the cats' food and water dishes, electrical cords and the space heater.
And when that's done, Kalina goes for Mommy's books, magazines, glassware, shoes and anything pretty that Mommy owns. She pulls anything heavy off of shelves and onto her person.
Finally, she heads straight for the stairs. Problem being, she has no clue how to climb down them, or even that they're not just an extension of the hall.
Essentially, every day Kalina becomes more of a hazard to her own health. Whether trying to shove a popsicle stick down her throat or testing the cats' patience with her enthusiastic pats, the girl romps through life like a cute puppy.
Meanwhile, SuperMom is vigilantly and wearily on the way to save the day, catching Baby one-handed as she topples to the ground, rescuing little fingers from drawers and redirecting her ecstatic attempts to climb into the fireplace.
Kalina is literally bouncing off the walls--and we don't have that many walls to begin with. Wrapping the baby (or the house) in bubblewrap would solve many of our problems, but that's not feasible at this time. What to do? How does one maintain safety and happiness for baby and house alike?
Answer #1: you don't. You leave the house and let the baby destroy produce in the grocery store or pit her against other peoples' pets.
Answer #2: you hold a massive garage sale and use the profit to buy padding for your walls (this comes in handy for you, the parent, too.)
Answer #3: you babyproof. Arguably, the best way to do this is to have adopted a 10-year-old in the first place, but usually by the time you think about babyproofing it's too late to make this well-thought-out decision instead.
We're rather reluctant babyproofers. About 2/3 of our reachable outlets have covers in them, and I created a veritable time capsule of some of my nicest things to be excavated in the not-forseeable future. Some I've given up on entirely and entrusted them to Craigslist. A few cabinets have locks on them, and four random table corners have padding. We have two baby gates that we only use on occasion.
We sacrificed half our dining room to give Kalina half a playroom, which she crawls straight out of whenever plunk her down in it.
And, one by one, we're teaching Kalina house rules such as "no crawling headfirst down the stairs" and "no tossing Mommy's pretty vases over your shoulder as you would an old sock."
Ideally, we could avoid all this nonsense by moving into a gymnasium. But where would we put the diaper pail?
It's not all bad, though. Kalina is remarkably useful at helping us sort junk mail and remove clean laundry from the basket for folding. Sometimes we wonder how we'd get the household chores done without her.
We've been told that babyproofing will only get more difficult as Kalina walks on her own, runs on her own and creates her own personal vortex of destruction on her own, so we should enjoy this period of relative calm in the meantime, much as you would enjoy the pleasant breeze of an impending tornado.
And I would say that we certainly are. We're also glad the weather's nice so we can sic her on Mother Nature, who occasionally makes a better, or at least hardier, mom than I am.
Photo: Kalina's new sand and water table, or our way of bringing the little destroyer outside.
