request for advice - free range kid?

[metaphortunate]

Advice requested:

The time is coming soon when the Junebug will be tall enough to climb out of his crib and need to switch to a toddler bed.

This is causing me to lose sleep with visions of a two-year-old wandering about the house unsupervised while Mr. E and I are (optimism, I know, given the newborn) asleep. I just lie awake and see him pulling bookshelves down on himself. Falling out of windows. Turning on the stove and burning himself. Figuring out a way to climb up to the knife blocks or the poisons shelf.

People who have dealt with this already: how did you deal with this? Did you lock them in their rooms? Did you put up baby gates? (We think at the point that he can climb out of his crib he'll be able to climb over a baby gate, but maybe that's not so.) Did you somehow manage to babyproof the whole house? What did you do?

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

You know, you'd think I'd remember this better considering that we just ordered the Pip a bed. I'm fairly sure that we just shut her door, because our doorknobs are old and she couldn't easily get out on her own, but it didn't really matter because she would just call us anyway rather than going looking. However, though SteelyKid _could_ climb out of her crib (and did, twice, before we got a crib tent while her actual bed was on order), she never tried climbing over a baby gate--so it's not an inevitable correlation.

If the Junebug can open doors himself and you're not comfortable locking his door, can you gate off between the bedrooms and the rest of the house, so that he'll come to your room before going wandering? (And lock the windows in the bedrooms/gate off the bathroom?)

[metaphortunate]

What kind of bed did you get him?

I think we can close his door, but I worry that then we won't be able to hear him, and also his room will get cold in the night. :/ Maybe we'll just baby gate off the top of the house.

[kate_nepveu]

Captain's bed, the kind with drawers underneath. SteelyKid has the same one.

Either baby monitors (will he sleep under a blanket? SteelyKid still won't, conditioning from the crib) or gating the top sounds reasonable!

[metaphortunate]

Aha. Those seem good!

He will accept starting to sleep under the blanket, but will sometimes thrash about and throw it off. :/ Really what we need to do is get better weatherstripping or possibly even replace the windows, but it seems unlikely that that will happen in the next two months.

[kate_nepveu]

Yeah, we got one for SteelyKid because her room and closet aren't very big and we wanted more storage. The Pip's room is bigger, but not having to worry about what might be lurking under the bed is quite appealing. Also this way they've got _the same thing_. *sighs at the Pip's current "everything SteelyKid has is automatically mine* phase*

[sara]

The older kid, we finally ended up putting a thumblatch-type lock on her door, but she was an unusually wandering-prone child. I felt terribly guilty about it at the time but after the night where she (at age 2) dragged an entire gallon of milk out of the kitchen and poured it into her carpet, while I slept, it was clear that our choices were Lock Up The Baby or I could quit sleeping for two to five years.

Since the latter would have made me completely nutso after two to five DAYS, we put the lock on.

She's now ten and seems basically fine, and what issues she does have are probably more the product of me worrying about closing her in at night than they are the product of me actually closing her in at night. I also used to have anxiety about the house catching on fire and her needing to escape, but that didn't happen either (but a thumblatch-style instant-open lock is a good idea, as are new batteries in your smoke detector).

[sara]

p.s. For context: this is a kid whose preschool had to rewrite their open-doors policy because she would sail off into the hinterlands without so much as a by-your-leave. This is a kid who, until we reinstalled the front-door deadbolt at adult eye level, would likewise take off into the road. As a toddler. This is a kid who I finally resorted to showing newspaper articles about exactly what happens to tween girls who get kidnapped by perverts, just this past summer, because she STILL hits the road anytime the urge to wander strikes, in defiance of all logic, preexisting plans, and common sense.

Most children, one doesn't have to go to these lengths. But if you do...know that you are not alone.

[metaphortunate]

Yes, this is what I worry about. :/

[sara]

Well, if he's at all like Herself: (1) my sympathies, we are all in this together; (2) I recommend locks up high when he's little and putting the fear of rapists and serial killers into him when he's bigger. Because that plus constant adult supervision are about all that's gotten me through to the precipice of the middle school years with the child basically intact. It is nervewracking.

[kalmn]

http://mobile.walmart.com/m/phoenix;jsessionid=689E0D2B399C6BFED900C370DECB2DE4#ip/Regalo-Easy-Open-Baby-Gate/7812821

Aglet couldn't climb that, or didn't, anyhow. Also we still had the baby monitor, so he knew that if he howled, we'd show up.

[metaphortunate]

Huh. And he was three, right?

[lovepeaceohana]

Lu never really wandered, he'd just yell for us and we'd come running. Nowadays of course he and his brother get up and maybe play with toys in their room in the morning, or go watch Hulu; I worry a little about KK, who's three, but generally they make enough racket once they're awake enough to cause trouble that it wakes us. (Well, that and they ask us to make breakfast pretty much immediately.)

Does Junebug have a history of trying to wander? If not you may have less to worry about. You could always litter the likeliest path with more interesting things that are likely to be distracting. I mean, you might not go for the stove over a bucket of Duplos or books, you know?

[metaphortunate]

He has Duplos and books available in his room, it is true. I worry about the lure of the forbidden, though.

[laurajv]

We closed Sunshine's bedroom door; when he learned to open it, we put a childproof cover on his doorknob. By the time he could defeat that, he was old enough that it didn't matter much. We're doing the same thing with Magpie, though we are only at the close-the-door stage -- she's still too short to effectively use a doorknob.

[metaphortunate]

Aha. Thank you.

[cahn]

Our kid doesn't tend to wander as much as some do, so she was never going to be a really huge problem, but what we did was when she did try to wander at night was a) tell her that now it was time to sleep and she needed to stay in bed, b) as soon as she exited her room, I would silently (silence was key) lead her back to bed and dump her back in. (Bonus points because I was the less favored parent at the time.) Rinse and repeat. I did have to stay fairly near her room for several nights, but after that she got the idea and has been pretty good about staying in her room (if not always her bed) since.

We've never actually closed the door of her room (my family was an open-door sort of family, so I never really got the hang of it, and since she wasn't unusually prone to wander it was never an issue).

In the mornings she will wander out of her room -- I've never tried to stop that -- but she really likes to play with mom and dad, so she'll yell for us if we're not up yet. I wish she'd play by herself! :)

[metaphortunate]

He's not a hugely wanderous kid so far, but I worry about what he will do if he ever realizes about Freedom.

[princessofgeeks]

I see you've got all kinds of good advice here. We had one night wanderer and one good sleeper, and we usually woke before they did in the morning. But for the night wanderer we basically did what the others have suggested.

Good luck!!!

[metaphortunate]

Thanks. :)

[resolute]

We let two-year-old K read books in her bed if she woke up before we did, and she could go to the potty, and do some other specific things. Some range, but not unlimited.

Two-year-old M we kept in a crib, and put a crib tent on it, and broke the zipper and safety-pinned the damn thing shut, after he flooded the bathroom on one occasion and nearly set fire to a bookshelf on another.

Your Mileage May Vary.

[metaphortunate]

Aaaaaa. D:

[loligo]

Both of my kids were clingy at that age and would come directly in to see us as soon as they woke up, so we did not have to deal with this issue. But if we had, I would have started with the baby gate.

[amaebi]

That's where I am. Plus Chun Woo slept through the night very well.

[metaphortunate]

I think we're leaning towards baby gating the upstairs.

[jrtom]

At night, we put childproof doorknob covers over the interior doorknob. This prevented escaping at a cost of occasionally being awakened by children banging on the door demanding release. (We still have a couple of those on the pantry door and the front door, for the sake of the 3-year-old; they slow down the 6- and 8-year-olds slightly but not a lot.)

To prevent daytime roaming charges, we put up retractable flexible child gates at strategic choke points (e.g. stairs); if this sounds interesting I'll look up the manufacturer. They're nice because they don't have to be in your way at all if you don't need them, and they fit into brackets that screw into the wall so you can move them around as needed. (And because they're flexible they're not easily climbable.)

We never managed to babyproof the entire house for any of the places we've lived.

[metaphortunate]

Yeah, which ones did you get?

[jrtom]

http://www.retract-a-gate.com/ makes the one we got. (And I'd offer to give you ours at this point if you were closer; we have at least two (and three sets of brackets) that are still in great shape.)

[dr_memory]

Luckily, the fact that I am insanely light sleeper coupled with the fact that we live in a single-level apartment has allowed us to take a pretty laissez-faire approach to this. Theda will occasionally decide to roam around the apartment at 3am, but we've never yet seen any evidence of her being able to do it without waking me up.

[metaphortunate]

At this point, if we can get to sleep, we sleep like the dead. :/

[thistleingrey]

At 18 mo my daughter's crib lost its front wall, and at 22 mo she moved to a twin bed (frame is solid with built-in drawers beneath--no crawling space) plus a stool to get up onto it. (We would've waited on the twin bed, but since we moved house then, it seemed easier to get the transition over with.) Till she was ~2.5 yrs, she waited to have us come and get her, though granted, at first she was a younger child than the Junebug is and it may've made her relatively tentative. Now she peeks around the doorway to look for me, and if she can't see me immediately, she seeks me or darkforge, not mischief. She'll be three within two weeks.

We had a baby gate keeping her out of our room at the old condo (unprotected bookshelves and a desire for me to sleep while I could sleep), but otherwise, since I'm a light sleeper (darkforge is not!), I figured that I'd be able to hear most perils. Much depends upon child personality. The "new" house is only minimally childproofed since move-in: chemicals under the kitchen sink under childproof lock, but other things are only moderately up out of reach--enough that her climbing up would make enough noise to wake me. It's a small house, and she understands both that knives can hurt her and that her parents would be very upset if she cut stuff up randomly. I am guessing that Something will happen within ages 3-5, but 2-3 has been totally fine....

[metaphortunate]

Yeah, the problem here is that our place now is big enough that he could climb up to the knife block in the kitchen and we would not hear it in the bedroom. :(

[lovepeaceohana]

If the knife block is the biggest concern, you might want to keep them in a locked drawer (I know, bad for the knives) - you can get kid-proof latches that install into them, or the more hardcore magnet locks. We've never really had trouble with knives because the kids have seen the results of mishandling them (a carrot got away from me while the kids were watching, it was just ugly enough to put a fear of knives into them) but we keep ours in a fiddly-to-open top drawer anyway, because yeah, there was virtually no place for a knife block to live with us that was not also easily accessible to a curious kid. There's a lot to be said too for "out of sight, out of mind," especially at this age.

[metaphortunate]

The knives, the windows, the bookcases that can't be bolted to the wall for a few months, the poisons (probably not reachable? It's hard to know just how good he is at climbing, or when he will learn to open the baby locks on the cabinets! That will happen eventually!)

[norah]

Depends on the kid? Despite being a regular hellraiser, A is also a total Mama's girl, so all she ever did was wake me up. Repeatedly. Ugh.