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

[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.