Monday, February 05, 2007

Baby-Proofing 101



You know, I wonder how come we are still alive. When I was a baby, I don't remember my parents ever baby-proofing the house. When we were kids, we climbed trees, rode bikes without helmets and never used car-seats.

I was discussing this with Fab the other day- by today's child-safety standards, we should both by now have been fried by electricty, crashed in cars, and bonked our heads into mental deficiency (so that is why i cannot use Excel!). But according to conventional wisdom in child-rearing today, we have to baby-proof our home so that our kid can explore safely. You can buy all kinds of stuff from anti-topple devices for your cupboards to rounded plastic protectors for all the corners on your furniture.

I started with the simplest ones - putting plastic edges to round out all the sharp wood corners in our house, and covering all the electrical power points with these tres chic plastic covers.

But then ran into difficulties...

In the IKEA store in China, they sell those plastic protectors for 3-pin sockets. But all the power points in our house also have 2-pin power points. I temporarily solved that problem by plugging in an appliance (see photo), in this case the humidifier... but what happens to all the other power points around? I don't want to end up with 10 humidifiers!!

3 comments:

Michael Low said...

You constantly remind me why we are not having kids...dogs are so much easier!~

Eugene said...

scotch tape!

DC said...

i was going to suggest tape, too. many layers of it.

my mother never bothered with all of that. i once electrocuted myself, though. thankfully it was in taiwan and i escaped unharmed. it was a buzz!