Reality Check

Thursday night, April 30th, started out like any other night. I got home from work and started our evening routine, if you would call it that. Everything was normal until bedtime. Violet does not like bedtime and usually will not go to sleep without a fight. However, for some reason, she fell asleep eating her bedtime bottle. I considered this a blessing, as this is how I used to put her to sleep...so much easier! So then I went and laid her in her bed and thought I had the rest of the night free!

Well, probably an hour later, Violet woke up crying. I go into her room to see what the problem is and she's standing in the corner of her bed! Needless to say, I freaked out. I immediately grabbed her and called John into her room to lower her mattress to the lowest setting (it was still on the highest setting). We had never seen her pull herself up to standing before so it was a total shock!

That was my first reality check that we need to start baby-proofing the house.

You see, Violet started crawling (finally!) on April 22nd.

And then on Saturday, April 25th, she sat up in her crib. When I woke up, I heard her talking to herself and went to get her. This is what I found.




That's right, my little girl was looking out her crib like she was in a prison cell! She was just calmly sitting there, kicking her legs through the rails trying to look over the top to figure out her next move, I suppose.

But even with the crawling and the sitting up in her bed, reality hadn't quite sunk in.

The third sign it was time to baby-proof that I'd been ignoring for quite some time is the fact that Violet likes to stick her finger into little holes exploring. You see, she has this little xylophone toy that she likes to turn upside-down and poke her fingers into the screw holes.

While I knew this would one day present a problem, I wasn't too worried because she wasn't yet crawling. So therefore, she couldn't stick her tiny fingers into the outlet holes.

Now is obviously an entirely different story.

But no, this point was not driven into my head until we found her standing in her bed.

I now am printing out baby-proofing your house checklists to make sure I don't forget anything. The first priority (lowering her bed) is already done. Next is installing outlet covers on all the outlets in our house. Third priority, not quite sure yet. I'm guessing cabinet and drawer locks. For normal people with babies, it would be picking up all the little things babies can put into their mouths. But Violet doesn't put things into her mouth yet. She often will pick up a quarter or other coin and just play with it. One day this will probably change, but for now, we're safe in that context.

So there is the story of how I got a reality check the other day. While I'm sure I'll have many more, that one sure did freak me out!