Can't Touch This

Now that Joey is into everything, we have had to step up our baby proofing a bit.  In our last home, we did not have any of the kitchen cabinets secured, but we did have a gate up blocking the kitchen from Joey.  We tried to put up gates to the kitchen in our new home, but the kitchen is a main walkway through the house, so the gates were downright annoying!   We left the cupboards alone and just cleaned up after Joey several times a day.  Well, as you can imagine, cleaning up after Joey, the tornado, everyday, several times a day got very annoying and tiring very quickly!   Michael finally put cabinet locks on all of the cabinets and all I have to say is, why didn't we do that earlier?!!?  It is amazing! 

As for our TV and our low sitting entertainment center, we had a massive baby gate wrapped around the media area to protect it from the tornado.  Our new living room is a lot smaller than our last one, so the big gate made the room even smaller and cluttered looking.   We finally found a tall entertainment center that had doors to store all of our DVDs, DVD player, etc.  This piece of furniture has been a nice change in our home!

By removing the baby gate from around the entertainment center, that allowed us to use it around our Christmas tree!   Perfect!   We were trying to figure out how to handle the tree situation with Joey.   Just get a small tree and place it on a table?   Only decorate the top half of the tree?  Ugh, Christmas with a toddler!  The baby gate around the completely decorated tree really has seemed to work...so far!  ;) 

Does a Baby Live Here?

I think so!  Ever since we had Joey, our house has a lot of baby stuff in it.  Gone are the days when our house was a party house or an adult house.  We now have baby swings, toys, bouncers, playpens, and burp clothes strewn all over our living area.  Joey has received so many toys, that I had to create a "toy box" for all of them! 

The only problem with this "toy box" was that it was so big and deep that the toys located on the bottom never really got touched.  Well, that's until Joey figured out how to dump the bucket over and get those toys! 

 

We bought this storage shelf to help display Joey's toys.  This has actually helped tremendously!  Joey now plays with all of his toys, not just the ones on the top of the bucket.  By the time playtime is over, all of Joey's toys are strewn everywhere!  I really like Joey's little play area.   

 We still have the playpen up, but this is super useful when I have to use the restroom, or step out of the room for one minute.  With Joey being mobile, he is gone in a flash!  Speaking of mobile, Joey has realized his crawling ability.  He is now ALL OVER THE PLACE!  I have already "lost" him in our house twice!  At least with the playpen, I know he will be stuck in the same location for at least a few minutes!

Once Joey became really mobile, I followed him to find out our "problem areas".  Michael and I already counted on our wine cabinet being one of these areas.  Joey proved us right.  This was actually one of the first places he crawled to.  At least he gets his good taste honestly!  :)  We will be getting rid of this cabinet (we hate it anyways) in the near future.  As for right now, we have turned it around so the wine and glasses face the wall. 

Joey also made a beeline for the fire place.  We knew that the entertainment center would be next, so we bought this giant play yard contraption so we could block off the entire area!  This is perfect!  Joey also likes the dog toys, so now, we just put the dog toy basket behind the fence so Joey can't get to those toys! 

We have a pretty large living room, so we decided to split it in half.  Half living room, half play area.  This has been a really good move.  Michael and I were both creating a bad habit by playing with Joey, but having the TV on at the same time.  Joey and us would watch TV, we wouldn't really be enjoying our Joey time, so this was a bad habit that needed to be stopped ASAP.  By splitting up the living room, we killed two birds with one stone.  Joey has a play area and we have an adult living room!  I'm not sure if you notice the baby gate we have up in the center of the photo.  We have baby gates blocking both hallways to the bedrooms, and a gate blocking access to the kitchen.  This has taken a lot of stress off of me because I have Joey somewhat contained now.  We also put rubber bumpers on the coffee table to help stop Joey from knocking his head!  All of the baby-proofing has taken some time, but I'm glad we have it done.  I know Joey is still gonna get hurt and get into things he shouldn't, but, hopefully, we have eliminated the major problem areas.