2 and a half

The gate, part 2

Audrey is becoming quite adept at slipping past the gates we have installed around the house. The gate we installed on her bedroom is now taken down - considering she can hurdle the thing she could conceivably hurt herself. (We want her to wait until she is at least 3 to practice becoming a track star.) But we also have gates mounted to the walls at the top of each stairway for obvious reasons. 

The gate upstairs is angle-mounted because the wall and the banister are not directly across from each other, leaving a small triangular space between the landing and the first stair below. Not ideal, but there's no other choice. When I installed it, however, I measured the opening and was sure a 2 year old's body couldn't wriggle through it. Maybe a 2 month old could, but Grace isn't crawling yet so I'll worry about that later.

This morning that 2 year old proved me wrong (again). When she wakes up she gets pretty antsy to get downstairs to begin her day, and so today, with no one looking, she casually slipped through the opening and headed downstairs. "Audrey?" my wife called out. "Mommy, I'm downstairs!" called Audrey.

With all the stunts Audrey has pulled lately it wouldn't have been out of the question to find her downstairs reading the Times over a cup of coffee, but maybe she's saving that trick for tomorrow. Instead she was standing in the foyer, obviously proud of her latest achievement.

"Come show me that again," my wife said.

Audrey hurried back up the stairs and proceeded to demonstrate how a two year old skirts a Kidco gate system that is supposed to be one of the best on the market. The task didn't look easy - she had to squeeze a bit and even tried a couple different ways before she resorted to the way that worked the first time, but she did it.

This development leaves me at a bit of a loss. Unless I want to nail a piece of plywood to my cherry hardwood floor, I can't get rid of the opening. And by the time Audrey is big enough to not fit, we won't need the gate anyway.

The gate

I wrote about Audrey's latest sleeping adventures here. The saga continues.

Each night for the past week or so, about an hour after going to bed, Audrey gets up. I'm not sure whether she thinks we're having a party without her or what, but she just seems to want to be part of the action. If someone doesn't go upstairs the excuses we hear across the baby monitor quickly evolve from loud talking to a symphony of yelling and crying - more like a mix of crying with the high-pitched whine of a chain saw layered in, really. It's hard to be a parent and let that carry on without responding - with the hope she'll go to sleep, of course - and we tend to cave in eventually. Particularly when she comes running down the hall and starts yelling from the top of the stairs.

The latest idea on our part was to put a plastic baby gate - the kind you can buy from Target that wedges between an opening - on the door to her room. If she cries and then gets out of bed, we thought, she can only get to the gate and eventually the crying will diminish and she'll either get back in bed or fall asleep on the rug. A great solution, right?

Last night was the first experiment. The pre-bedtime routine went fine as usual, and Audrey went to bed quietly. I decided to stay upstairs in the adjacent room for a bit to monitor things. It took about 20 minutes this time before she called out, "Daddy, I need some chapstick!" (That's one of her latest creations.) The usual procession of excuses followed, and then crying.

Suddenly I heard her get out of bed. No way she's getting past her gate, I thought (it's probably three feet high and the box it came in reads, "Child-resistant" and "Sturdy, climb-resistant panels"). But then something was different. It got quiet for a moment. I heard a couple grunts and she suddenly sprinted past the opening of the door down the hallway. I was stunned. "Audrey?!" I called out. She stopped and ran back. "Daddy, I was calling you!" I picked her up.

It all happened so fast she might as well have hurdled the thing. Maybe she did - the gate was still in place, just as I had set it up. "How did you do that?" I asked her. "I don't know," she shrugged. I couldn't believe it. Back to the drawing board, and back to Target.