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

[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.