In My Own HGTV Show

A few nights ago, we decided to move Molly's portable crib into our walk-in closet. The closet is only technically a walk-in, meaning you can walk in exactly one step, but there was exactly enough room for a mini crib. There were other options – Jack's room, the bathroom, the hallway – but the closet won out for being the most convenient. It's sad when the most convenient option means I can't get to my clean underwear until after her morning nap.

We were a few years from having kids when we bought this house. I imagined having a baby here, sure, but being kidless at the time, I was decorating a guest bedroom in my head, not a nursery. Kidless me was excited for beautiful hardwood floors and a powder room. It never occurred to me to consider what high chair wheels do to a wood floor, or that a powder room provides yet another toilet for endless and annoying toddler amusement. I certainly never dreamed I'd need enough room in the master bedroom closet to stash a BABY.

As Jack grew more curious and mobile, we slowly adapted the house to fit our emerging needs. I found new homes for the breakables I used to keep on the bottom shelves. We arranged the stereo equipment to make sure he couldn't reach the cords. We even swapped out our giant glass-topped coffee table for a more baby-friendly leather ottoman. What we couldn't really do anything about was the actual house.

Sliding glass doors on the bathtub, for example. Who thought that up? Obviously not someone who's had to lean over the metal door track to scrub down a squirming child. We have built-in shelves on the corner of the kitchen island, which I emptied of cookbooks the day Jack started crawling. One day, Jack will stumble and fall backwards into one of those sharp corners and Child Protective Services will come for me. And why is the third bedroom on the bottom floor of our three-story house? How is THAT helpful?

It's not quite the clean, shiny pad that hosted dinner parties and out-of-town friends in our pre-kid days, especially now that we've shoved the dinner table up against a wall to make more room to play. We still manage to have the occasional dinner guest and party, but it's been a long time since the guest bathroom upstairs was used for anything besides storing the diaper pail.

Of course sometimes, no matter how baby-proofed your house is, no matter how much space you make for the kids, no matter how much effort you expend organizing and arranging, the children will find a way to destroy it. Over the weekend, Jack chucked his plastic shopping cart down a flight of stairs. No big deal, I thought. I went down to retrieve it and saw this:

 

 

Anyone know how to fix that?

Visit Mighty Maggie's personal blog.