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Posted by Karen
on 3/6/2009, 7:30 am, in reply to "Siblings, twins' safety"
75.169.140.77
I agree with everything Wendy said. Your life will just have to be different for a while.
I'll tell you what else we did. We had the twins and a singleton 11 months older, so a lot of toddler trying to get into a lot of trouble. I lived in a 1700 sq ft, single-story house, and I had five baby gates. (I love the screw-in wooden ones with vertical slats. I've heard too many stories about multiples using the diamond shape frames to climb out.) Rather than put baby locks on all my kitchen cabinets, I just gated the three entrances to the kitchen. No kids went in there unless I was in there to keep an eye on things. (Found a baby crawling on an open oven door one day, that did it for me. Plus I hate baby cabinet locks.) We also had one gate on the hall that led down to the bedrooms and bathrooms for crowd control. And even though all cleaning supplies were put in high cabinets, I didn't like the babies playing in the toilet or playing with the toilet paper, etc. And my 9-year-old's room had a hook and eye lock. No toddlers in there ever. Way too many legos on the floor and bizarre things he'd dragged in from the curb. My room and the office were baby proofed the ways that Wendy suggested. Our final gate was on the toddlers' bedroom. Sometimes they just needed to be in there playing while I got things done. Also served us well when they came out of cribs and I wanted them to stay in their room at night. I much preferred the baby gate to a closed door. I could still hear them fine, they could still hear me fine, I could peak around the corner. What else? I moved the handle on the front screen door up to 4 feet so they couldn't operate it. We did have a sliding glass door, but it had so much sand crammed in the runners it was hard to open. (Go to Home Depot. They sell a number of different ways to secure the sliding door from bars to locking pins.) I think that's about it. You do have the hazard of a 4-year-old. You are going to have to work extra hard on teaching him not to leave toys they could choke on around or just put those away for awhile.
Things do get better. Over the months my gates got used less and less, and by the time the twins were just over three we moved to a new two-story house with no gates anywhere. Cleaning supplies and sharp objects were still put up high, I still cooked on the back burners of the stove, but pretty much the trouble they were getting into by then was coloring on the walls and dragging mud pies into the house.
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