Let The Games Begin

And by games, I mean baby-proofing. It's a game because the trick is to baby-proof before she figures out what she can get into that she shouldn't. So far we're tied, one-one.

Here's a picture of our living room, it's a little old (the cradle is gone now) but you get the gist. The key things to note here are the shelf under the coffee table and the bookcase.

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The coffee table shelf is where we'd been storing games with tiny pieces, like scrabble and dominoes. This is where I lost. She figured out how to break into the games before we figured out we needed to move them (remember she's not crawling yet, supposedly). So, the games have been replaced with a shoebox full of booties, hats, other smallish clothing articles, a box of large Brio blocks, and a couple other more baby-friendly items. I figured she might like opening up the boxes and dumping out the clothing and blocks, since she enjoyed it so much with the games. I was right.

{poor Dragnet, I just noticed his forlorn face in the background}

The lowest shelf of the bookcase, on the other hand, she hadn't discovered yet. This is good because it was chock full of stamps. Stamps in bags, in books, in cigar boxes, in tins, individual stamps floating around, tiny bundles of stamps stacked up and wrapped with twine. In other words, baby heaven. This is the collection Pete inherited from his great-aunt. I have no idea if it's worth anything beyond the shear volume of stamps, but in that it is amazing.

The collection has now been safely moved to an upper shelf of a closet. Phew. It has been replaced with a few bins of toys and stuffed animals, and a few photo albums. I figure by the time she's learned how to pull the albums out she'll be ready to flip through them instead of eat them.

I don't know if moving her toys to the shelf drew her attention or if we were mere seconds away from a baby-stamp fiasco, but I moved the stamps last night and I'd captured this image by mid-afternoon today.

Disaster averted. We'll see what the next round holds.