Electric Fence? Or Padlock?
Posted By jayna on December 11, 2009
I stood in the hallway, staring at the baby gate. It hasn’t been used as a “baby” gate in months, but more a “keep the dog away from the cat food” kind of gate. E takes it down whenever she sees fit. However, she’s never seen fit to take it down any time other than during daylight hours.
Until last night.
My mother’s house is your basic 1970′s split level. Three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. A living room, dining room and kitchen in the middle. And the family room, laundry room and second bathroom downstairs. We have the back two bedrooms and keep the gate in the hallway, just in front of the two doors. The hallway is funky and the gate has no perfectly flat pressure points, so it comes down if you push hard enough.
Apparently, it’s been serving as a means of false security. I’ve always known that E could take it down, but I’ve never thought she would when it actually mattered. Like, when everyone else in the house was sleeping . . .
Early this morning, I woke up to the sound of the gate being messed with. E had been up and in and out of our room all night, so I stumbled into the hallway to put her back to bed. She looked as though she was simply fiddling with the latch on the other side of the gate, as it was in the proper place and snug. So, I tossed her back in bed and crawled back into mine, never thinking how it was weird that she was in the hall and hadn’t come to my side of the bed the way she had the other 684 times she woke up.
Hours later, the husband went downstairs to the bathroom. The rug was sopping wet. Two bath towels were on the counter, also sopping wet. The faucet was dripping and the bucket we water the plants with was in the sink, full of water. He was thoroughly confused, but chalked it up to something my mother had done when she left for work earlier in the morning. However, she claimed the bathroom had been dry when she left. Not a drop in sight.
We have an escapee on our hands.
An escapee that apparently had dirty hands and felt the need to let herself out of her room in the wee hours of the morning after Grandma left for work, take down the gate, walk down two flights of stairs and pull her little stool up to the bathroom counter so she could wash her hands. Somewhere along the way, she decided to give the dog some water and filled up the bucket to dump it in the bowl. Not much made it to the bowl. The rug got soaked and she pulled the bath towels from the rack to dry the counter top. Then she put her little stool back and came all the way back upstairs, put the gate perfectly back into place and then got “caught”.
Or, so we hope.
God only knows what sort of escapades she may have had in the half hour she may have been up for, as that’s all we managed to drag from her toddler vocabulary.
And so, that is how I found myself double checking all the locks on the doors before coming upstairs to deal with the gate. Before staring at it, wondering how on earth to keep the child contained. Before realizing that she’s just too freaking tall for a two year old and there was no way simply raising it a few inches would keep the latch out of her reach.
Thus, I rigged it.
Here’s hoping the mighty crash wakes me up next time.
Clever kid!
Oh no! Cooper has become quite the master of the gates, and on more than one occasion I have woken up to find him sitting on the kitchen floor eating marshmallows at 5:30 in the morning. Here's hoping that crash is a loud one!