H - Home Safety

I have mixed feelings on the next topic for my A to Z Challenge. I am going to talk about home safety. Now, there are some child safety things that I feel very strongly, and others that I am like whatever on. They come from personal experience.

My children are too smart for their own good. With our oldest, we did the whole sh-bang. We had baby gates, child locks on the cabinets and drawers, and we had the outlet covers. With our second, we added the fridge lock (a joke) and sealing the dressers to the wall (learned the hard way without injury). So, when our third came along seven years later, we were more complacent. Here are the safety items we find necessary.

Source

• Door Locks - we place them on the outside of ANY room we do not want the kids in. We also place it on the inside of the girls room so that they can't get out in the middle of the night (big fear)
• Baby Gates - These are the best things EVER. We use them on the patio to keep the young ones on the patio and the animals off. We also use them on the stairs to prevent injury. I am also using them during potty training to keep the girls in the area where the potty chair is.
• Drawer & Cabinet Locks - We use these on the cabinets under the sink or where we keep our plastic bags. We use the drawer locks on the drawers that have the knives, cheese grater, and aluminum foil (or other boxes with ouchie edges). We do NOT put them everywhere because we want to use them as a deterrent where needed but encourage curiosity.

The other home safety that we do is teaching the child what is a no no. Our children know that playing with the outlets is not okay, however, they do know (all of them) how to plug in a phone charger.

We teach them about safety, rather than make them scared of it. The biggest problem we are having at the moment is Turtle doesn't understand parking lots and streets. This is because ALL the kids play on our loop! Hard to tell a child not to run and play on the street when she is watching other children doing it. We are hoping with time, the understanding comes. Until then, she will have to keep throwing a temper fit in our arms as we prevent her from running out there.

What are your go to safety equipment?

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