Baby proofing tips!

Hello Tuesday! Hope everyone's weekend was swell. It seems like summer is dwindling down and everyone is headed back to school in anticipation of Fall. I definitely know that we are soaking up all the beautiful sun we can get here in the Pacific Northwest but yesterdays cool weather was a nice preview of autumn and reminded me why I moved to Oregon. Last week I mentioned how papa and I started to baby proof our house and I wanted to share a few tips and tricks to keeping your home still feeling like "you" yet safe for your little one. We have a lot of stuff and I was clearly in denial that our kid would mess with any of it. Seriously, in my mind I just kept thinking that all I would have to do is tell Miles "No Bubbie, don't touch!" YEAH, FREAKING RIGHT! Once my babe started to stand up it seemed as if all curiosities let loose and nothing was out of reach not to mention everything went in his mouth. The continuous picking up after the stack of books and records that I just cleaned up was torture and had to stop. In all seriousness, my major concern was the safety of my boy in our home so last week we decided to move all of our knick knacks up and take any hazardous stuff out.

We moved our hairpin plant stands to the porch and isolated the rest of the greens with the wooden screen to keep Miles from knocking down the plants. This really opened the space up with more room for him to play in too.

 

Papa added a simple shelf to this stand for added book storage and moved the crate to face inward to keep Miles from getting to it. Worked like a charm!  

 

 A few of our records were displayed in a stand that was totally in Miles' reach and were getting destroyed. So to help salvage our records yet still have them close by the player, we moved them into a metal crate that is deep enough that Miles cant pull them out...yet!

 Papa worked super hard on making these wonderful shelves for our living room. All the pre-made shelving that we saw at Home Depot were in poor quality and not worth the price. We ended up buying lumber and cutting them down to size at home to fit the entry way space. Steve painted them a dark chocolate which complimented all of our bits and baubles really well. Adding these shelves was a major importance on our baby proofing list and we are so happy with the end result!

 We moved everything off of all reachable surfaces and added boxes everywhere. We stored our dvds and books into these affordable boxes from Ikea and other crates to keep our kiddos curious hand from getting to them. We are big fans of baskets, crates, boxes and containers! We like our home to stay somewhat organized and having baskets around the living room to put his toys into really makes cleaning up easy and consistent. We store all of our smaller odds and ends in these super neat cubbie drawers on the coffee table. 

 Having toys at arms reach is waaaay better then grabbing books and knick knacks!

We added a shelf and toys to our crate stands for Miles to play with. Those magazines later ended up in the basement and more toys joined.

 Steve also added more shelves to our kitchen with the left over lumber.

We weren't prepared for the heat wave that hit us the first week of August and in an attempt to stay cool we used this awesome old fan in our living room. Stupid, stupid idea! Not only is it a major danger to peoples hands, the damn thing ate my hair. I was bending over to unplug it one night when the blades grabbed my hair and tangled it close to my scalp before I knew it. Scary! Luckily, Steve was home to help cut my hair out of the damn thing but once that happened I became terribly aware that Miles could become in reach of it at any time. Needless to say, we moved it to our bedroom for display use only. 

If your like me and have a cluttered home, just be super cautious of all of your possessions, big or small, at your kiddos reach. I know that's a no-brainer thing to say but you'd be surprised at all of the things we first over looked until he wiggled his way into it.