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

[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.)