kiddy proof your home (Health and Safety in General)

Member Name: barbie84

Product:	Health and Safety in General
Date:	02/03/09 (80 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: safety

Disadvantages: children find a way around it

When nearly 6 years ago we had our first child everyone had said to me about safety items but i though no we wont need any of them and boy was i wrong.

My first child wasnt too bad she wasnt realy a messer who got into everything so my safety items purchased with her were two safety gates to go on the stairs one at the top the other at the bottom to stop her being able to fall down the stairs, i think these are a must for any parent with a stair case.
I purchased door stoppers which are c shaped pieces of rubber that fit around the door to stop her being able to get her fingers caught in the door which worked brilliantly.

Then arrived my second and boy were we in trouble this time,

Our troubles started when she was just 10 months old and had realised if she pulled her self up the side of her cot she could lean her head over and drop out of the cot, as you know cot sides are quite high so i was worred about her getting rurt so got her a bed with a safety rail which i brought from the argos for around £15 to stop her rolling out of bed, This didnt stop her scrawling around the up stairs of our house at all hours of the night though so i had to buy another stair gate for her bedroom door to stop her escaping.

Now she was crawling nothing was safe, there were till reciepts, food and any thing else small enough to fit through the hole in my video player so i brought a safety kit which contained a video guard which was a piece of plastic that stopped her being able to put things in the video, included in this set there were also socket covers for the plugs which i thought better to be safe than sorry and they are still there now even though they are now 4 and nearly 6 years old.

Cupboard doors were our next big bug bear, i had the rubber bungs on the normal house doors but my little one would get the cupboard doors and bang them, and on occasions trap her fingers which luckily was never seriously hurt. I brought a pack of plastic locks for these doors which i think i have reviewed previously, they are in two pieces and to get the cupboard or drawer open you have to push the one piece down to release the catch, these didnt work at all she soon got the hang of these and the biggest problem with them was that the gap was very small that you had to get your fingers in so my hubby couldnt undo the locks.
I resorted to putting elastic bands around the cupboard handles to hold them together and i have no idea why but she never managed to work these out.

As the children got older and could reach the handle on my external doors they got into a habbit of wandering out when ever they wanted too, and although the garden is secure i needed to know when they had opened the door becuse of the animals escaping, i got some door alarms from instore, 4 in a pack that when they are opened sounds an alarm so i always know when they open the doors now.

As well as this i had to put viv locks on all the vivariums to stop them opening the doors on the cages and loosing the animals out.

Just as i thought our problems with safety were over and we could start to relax my daughters were cutting up christmas cards and making pictured with them using childrens sizzors from the early learning center, my youngest cut her pig tail off with the sizzors to my horror. I have now banned all sizzors

There are numerous things you can do to make your home safe for your child but you will never be able to kiddy proof everything.

Summary: as safe as possible will never be kiddy proof as you never know what they are going to do next