As long as you stay in the box, you will not be harmed. Bonus points for: open fireplaces, roof terraces and piping hot radiators.Īnother reason to keep the “play pen (prison box)”, purposely kept unknown to the Dutch, is to prepare our young ones from their very conception for a lifetime of accepting boundaries set by external powers.
#BABYPROOF WINDOWS WINDOWS#
sit back, schedule your birth, and admire your fully ‘baby-proofed’ home.dream house is now an (albeit empty) padded sanctuary and oasis of safety filled with only the best organic cotton cushions and floor pillows.heck, remove all furniture, accessories and home decor items can live strategically positioned floor cushions and pillows alone.remove superfluous furniture, accessories and home decor items.
add rubber padding to all walls and exposed surfaces.crawl around on hands and knees to effectively “get into baby’s environment” and spot missed “risk zones”.if your house now resembles a jail for tiny prisoners it means you are half-way there.buy baby gates, door gates and stair gates.bolt everything to the wall and/or floor.
#BABYPROOF WINDOWS INSTALL#
buy and install toilet locks, fridge lock and furniture straps.buy and install bump guards, edge guards and corner cushions for all furniture.buy and install expensive rail guards, window guards, cabinet locks, radiator covers and electric socket plugs.apply tacky window decals to all sliding-glass doors and floor-to-ceiling windows which once showcased gorgeous view.rip down walls and re-level sunken-living room.hire expensive baby proofer + even more expensive architect and builder to make “critical emergency modifications” to dream home.get pre-term contractions due to shock of discovering you live in an “extremely high-risk ‘red-alert’ environment”.hire expensive baby proofer to tell you in details every single thing that is wrong with said dream house.get pregnant on ‘dangerously high’ California-king size mattress.In retrospect, I shoulda just printed and handed out the below instructions and we could have all moved on, agreeing to disagree. The Dutch women were aghast: “a babyproofer?! You actually pay someone to tell you what’s wrong with your own house?!” The transplanted foreigners were equally incredulous: “How could anyone with children possibly live here?! Don”t people die on Dutch stairs?” I stood in the middle of the two camps understanding each side, yet knowing that the cultural divide on this topic was far too wide to breach. Over the course of the evening, the conversation inevitably turned to the subject of “babyproofing” as the home we were dining in was the stuff of nightmares for most American parents: open fireplace, 3 flights of treacherous stairs, multi-levelled floors with low railings and floor to ceiling windows that drop down to the canal lined street below. The dinner party consisted of a mix of Dutch and “expat” moms all living in the Netherlands. In my most recent book, Stuff Dutch Moms Like, I share a personal anecdote of attending a dinner party at an American friend’s home in Amsterdam. The act of babyproofing reduces risks to a level considered acceptable by a society, or, for example, to specific parents. : the act of making an environment or object safer for children. Babyproof: verb, transitive + intransitive
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