The Baby Must Be Contained
She's gotten good at figuring out how to hurt herself. Time to baby-proof!
My 10-month-old daughter currently has a tiny bruise on her forehead, because yesterday she hit herself in the face with a wooden spoon. It was the first thing she did when it was handed to her. Spoon. Hand. Hit. Scream. No more wooden spoons for the time being.
We have entered the phase of child development where the baby spends a nonzero percentage of her burgeoning brainpower looking around for objects within arm’s reach that she is not supposed to have. If there are multiple objects accessible, she will select the one that is the most dangerous and grab for it. Once she has it, if we do not get it within seconds, she will figure out a way to hurt herself with it.
She’s like a tiny Jason Bourne attempting to reappropriate everyday household objects into weapons she can use in a fight with herself. Her recent focus on standing and rolling has complicated things further.
When she would just sit there in the middle of her play area reaching for faraway objects as though willing them to fly into her hands, I would be able to sit in the chair in the corner of the nursery and keep an eye on her. But now, anything further than the length of a desperate leap is risky.
My husband and I cannot spend every waking moment in a state of readiness to tackle her and wrestle a dangerous object from her little fist. First, because it’s not practical; nobody would get any work done around here.
Second, because even when somebody is watching her, she still tries to get into things she shouldn’t. And she’s fast. Frighteningly fast. She’s almost rolled off the couch twice while I was sitting right next to her, has seized handfuls of adapter cords after I turned my back for a second, can utilize tiny cracks in furniture to pull herself halfway to standing, like a rock climber.
“Maybe we should enroll her in a martial arts class,” I told my husband the other day as I tried to wrangle a tiny remnant of a plastic bag her lightning-fast hands had gotten to before mine could. (I haven't looked into it yet, but I think she's too young.)
Third, while I love my daughter dearly, I can only sit there watching her do her little baby experiments with her sanctioned and safe toys for so long before it gets a little boring.
I’ve got grown up interests like reading every issue of The New Yorker up to Shouts & Murmurs before I put it down and forget where I left it, and scrolling through the part of TikTok that declares that if I am an Aquarius moon, I will soon be betrayed by a person whose name starts with the letter S. The baby is supposed to play without me sometimes; it’s important for her development.
Plus, I only have to watch for a few minutes at a time before I get the idea. When she's not actively trying to hurt herself, her stationary play involves banging one toy against another toy, biting the toys, screaming at the toys, babbling at the toys, throwing one toy, setting one toy down and picking another up and sitting back and surveying her work. I don’t understand what’s going on and frankly none of it makes sense, it’s like half paying attention to an audiobook version of Finnegans Wake read by a drunk person. But if I turn my head away for a moment-- BAM.
The only way to disarm a tiny superspy bent on self-destruction is to block access to as many of the deadly weapons available to her as possible. She cannot be defeated, but maybe she can be contained. In other words: time for baby proofing.
Planning for baby proofing is one of the less pleasant rituals of new-ish parenthood, because it involves slowly walking through one’s living space and reflecting on all of the ways that it is a literal toddler death trap. It combines two of my most maladaptive personality traits– obsessiveness and catastrophizing anxiety– and combines them into a single activity wherein I try to come up with every possible way that my child might maim herself. The heavy-sticky dread I get doing it is the evil twin opposite of the excitement I get when I think about different ways to dress Juniper for her first Halloween. Baby proofing is horrible and in retrospect I wish I’d just hired somebody to do it for me. Maybe I still will, just to get a second set of eyes on things.
But I have made some progress, and by some progress I mean that I’ve ordered an array of plastic doohickeys designed to keep babies from slamming their hands in doors, impaling themselves on the furniture, tipping heavy objects over, opening cupboards, falling down stairs, entering forbidden rooms and, most important of all, escaping a designated play area.
Despite all of this I know that she will eventually hurt herself. Toddlers hurt themselves; it’s one of the main things they do besides bring germs home from daycare and throw tantrums centered on specific items of clothing.
I wish I could shrink myself to 30 inches tall and give myself an enormous head and toddle around like baby Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows beta testing the steps I’ve taken to see if the steps I’m taking will be enough to stave off the most serious injuries. But I can’t. Now that she’s moving around, it’s just my husband and me versus the baby versus every object currently in our house. May the best man win.
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