Let The Baby Proofing Begin!

Echo against the new fabric we put up to keep her from falling out of the loft ;-)

Echo has been getting increasingly mobile over the past few weeks and although she isn't technically crawling yet she is so close! In spite of the fact that she isn't exactly making the crawling motions she still manages to scoot, wriggle and pivot her way around the room. You can seriously look away for a minute, look back and she'll be five feet from where you left her. This has necessitated the beginning of our baby proofing efforts. It's a day we both looked forward to and dreaded. While we are excited at Echo's continued development our house is a baby proofing nightmare and we have so much to do! Here is what we've started with so far. 

A small portion of the cords we removed from the loft.

 Echo has lately developed a fascination with cords and wires of any kind, yikes! Any cord she can get her hands on goes directly in her mouth for chewing, this obviously had to stop. Since we spend most of our family time in the loft where the carpet is easy for her to play on we had to really re-examine the space. You see, the loft is also where our computers and tv live. Eric spent a good part of the day yesterday reworking as many of our electronics as he could to be wireless, allowing us to remove a lot of the wires and cables. What we couldn't remove got tucked away either up under a desk or under the edge of the carpet.

The loft seen from below

One of our big worries in baby proofing was the railing in our loft. It has widely spaced rungs that would be easy for her to slip though. At the same time this area is highly visible when you first walk in the house so we wanted it to be somewhat attractive still. We purchased three yards of fabric on sale at Ikea and used a heavy duty staple gun to fasten it to our railings. It's up there so well now that there's no way she can tear it down and it keeps us from worrying about her falling through.

Newly cleaned and organized loft

We also spent some time generally de-cluttering and cleaning the loft, the less random junk we have laying around the less there is for her to get in to. It already looks so much nicer without all the clutter that tends to build up in a highly used area. I just hope we can keep it this nice!

Still to come are baby gates at the tops and bottoms of the stairs and child safety locks on the cabinets and drawers. On top of that we still have to baby proof the rest of the house! This baby thing sure is a lot of work! Good thing she's so cute ;-)