Child-proofing

When Ella was a baby, we really did not have to child-proof anything. Our house is tiny and she did not get into anything. Well, now we have the double whammy: toddler Ella who thinks she is the Mommy and Benjamin, who is fast on his way to becoming stink on wheels. He rolled front to back for the first time on Monday, was sitting up by Wednesday (mostly on his own) and will probably be crawling any minute.

Yesterday, as I was finishing my run, I had a strange thought go through my head that I may come home to an empty house because something had happened to Benjamin while I was gone. I brushed it off as a paranoid thought related to his upcoming surgery. But I walked in to an empty house... everyone was in the backyard, but it turns out that while I was gone, Ella had dug through one of my handbags and pulled out an old box of Werther's I'd had when I was pregnant and tried to feed one to Ben. Thankfully, Scott caught her. Now, she would likely not eat it herself, but Benjamin just may want some forbidden candy.

This morning, she came out of the bathroom with a piece of toilet paper, prepared to help Ben blow his nose.

And as I was completing the very minimal assembly on a stable toy for Ben, trying to find the teeny hole to insert a plastic pole, Ella tells me, "Mommy, be careful! That was by my face. Be careful with my face, you might broked it!"

Last night, we had our first sibling rivalry moment. As Ella sat on the floor coloring, Ben scooched over and tried to chew on the book, she told him no, got mad, shoved him and moved to the other side of the room.

Finally.... while accidentally dripping nail polish remover on the floor this morning, I said, "Shoot!" I did not say it loudly, but in a tiny house, there are no secrets. Ella came running from her room to tell me, "Mommy, don't say shoot. It isn't a nice word. Say, 'Stink!'"

And so we must childproof our lives. We had an easy 2 1/2 years.