We have a few of these coming to our house for T-Giving this year. One of their kids is a toddler. They’re family, so I can’t just not invite them, however, I’m not going to redecorate the house, aside from safety plugs in all the outlets, just to make it easy for them to forget they have kids.
Is there a way to lovingly but firmly say “Your kid, your responsibility” when they arrive, so that nobody assumes that everybody else is the babysitter?
(This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine re: kids, and holiday time is not a time where I’m free to police the place and make sure kids aren’t falling down stairs, shoving stuff in their mouth, walking out the front door…)
Maybe give them a call to remind them that since your home isn’t childproofed, you really need them to watch their children or ask them how much they can afford to spend since you’ll need to hire a babysitter for the day.
We’ve got a similar issue coming up in December. My partner’s niece, husband, teenage son (from an earlier marriage) and toddler from this marriage are staying with us for 3 nights on their way to Japan. Oof! We’ve never had a toddler in the house before. We had an infant one night, who spend the entire time in a playpen, so that was ok. This toddler is, I think, in the neighborhood of 2 years old.
So I too am interested in any advice on child-proofing. Remove breakables, plugs in sockets, ok. I’m not interested in child-proofing all the cabinets and drawers where danger might lurk, though.
IMO, as a parent, it’s not actually possible to “childproof” a house anyway. You can certainly make it more child-friendly, but what you do is VERY much dependent on the development and habits of the child concerned and you can never stop watching anyway. Especially if there are any older kids involved - actually I think older kids are one of the worst childproofing hazards around, since they often try to be “helpful” and do stuff for the baby that they actually shouldn’t be doing (here kid! Have a peanut! Oh - too short to open that door? I’ll open it for you!)
I don’t see why any parent should get their nose out of joint with a polite “Please remember my house isn’t very childproof - just take care, ok?”
If you have stairs, perhaps you could enquire if they have a stair gate of their own they could bring to stop their kid wandering up them? (that is, if their kid is not stair-safe - at age one, they might or might not be)
Things you can do to make it easier for the parents…
Take away anything breakable from tables under about a metre tall. Also plan to put food on similar-height tables.
Keep at least one nice high (spotting a pattern here? ) surface for guests stuff that they don’t want interfered with.
Be sympathetic to parents attempts to rearrange things so that their kids can’t get their sticky fingers in it. They should certainly ask you before they (say) shift a table in front of the desk drawers to physically prevent their being opened, but you should say yes.
Step 2: Leave flathead screwdrivers near every outlet, sharp objects on the coffee tables, small (chocking hazzard) toys underneath them, easily broken but very inexpensive glass objects in easy reach, etc, etc.
Step 3: “Ooops! How’d that happen?”
Nah, I think Roderick Femm caught part of it. Remove EVERTHING. Take all the small shit out of your living room and put it away. Get socket covers (cheap), put everything breakable at a higher altitude. Block stairways you won’t be using with chairs, ironing boards or whatever works. Close the doors to your bedrooms and any other rooms not in use, so you’ll notice if the doors are open - which is a sign to go check those rooms.
Put your pets away - they might whine, but they’ll thank you later for not being tortured by midgets. Put their food and water dishes away (small kids will play with them) and also the cat boxes. You don’t want some 2 year old handing you a clump of litter covered cat shit in the middle of the meal.
Keep your eyes open, but don’t do the actual baby-gathering work yourself. If you notice that Junior is doing something you don’t want him to do, alert the parents, ala “Hey, please stop Junior from doing that”. Don’t make it too wishy-washy or weak, and don’t put up with excuses why they can’t do it. Do the deed yourself only if you have to, then remind the parent that you have other responsibilities and you’d appreciate it if they watched their own kid.
I wouldn’t even put safety covers in the outlets. That’s probably why I never had toddlers over to my house - toddlers belong in other people’s houses, as far as I’m concerned.
I like your idea of telling the parents when their kid is doing something, not stopping the kid yourself, Chimera. I’ve seen this scenario, too, where parents plunk themselves down and expect everyone else to run after their kids now. It’s like they assume that 10 adults hanging around equals 10 babysitters. Nuh-uh - I don’t even know half the stuff kids aren’t supposed to do. No peanuts? No stairs? No desk drawers? News to me.
I think the safety cover thing is overdone, myself. We don’t have any. Sockets with things plugged into them are a worse hazard IMO, and I don’t know anybody who unplugs everything in the house for the sake of toddler safety (you’d go crazy in short order)
We had to put up our Christmas tree this last weekend (our only chance before Christmas) and I’ll be darned if I’m going to un-decorate the bottom 3 feet just so the toddler doesn’t get into it (didn’t think of this conflict beforehand). I expect this will probably be a big “temptation” for the kid.
In my humble-bordering-on-defensive opinion, they’ve gotta keep the eye on the kid so it doesn’t make a bee-line for the tree. The main gathering room will be in a different room—I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing. Should I offer them to un-decorate the tree themselves if they can’t trust themselves to be watchful?
I guess my question is: how much do I have to do for a guest that has “issues” in this area? I’m a nervous nellie about kids/danger anyway, which is one reason why I don’t have kids of my own, but how much do I need to “bend” for guests? I’m already hosting because I’m the only one in the family who can manage a big dinner like this. Do I also have to worry about making the house ready for their level of parenting?
I guess I’m wising for somebody to say, “No, a warning should suffice.”
I personally think that if you’ve invited the toddler, you do hold some responsibility to keep your house relatively safe. You shouldn’t have to babyproof because toddlers and small children will always be faced with placed that aren’t, but you really have to anticipate accidents. Mostly, I clear away the stuff I REALLY don’t want broken, and I make an effort to keep cook handles turned in and cords tucked in.
While it’s the parents’ job to watch the kid, little ones are FAST and can ruin your nice crap in the time it takes for mom or dad to grab a cheese doodle and doily.
Do the parents of said toddler live nearby? Would having visitors over for an hour on Wednesday be really disruptive to your plans? If yes to the first, and no to the second, give them a call tomorrow and say “Hey, I don’t know much about kid-proofing the house. Do you plan to keep __ contained in a playpen, or does one of you want to come over for a little while tomorrow and make sure things are safe for ___?” Ideally, they’ll either take you up on the offer, or be guilted into keeping an eye on the kid if they don’t.
If they still let him run amok, it’s a good basis for a holiday fight, and there’s bound to be one of those anyway, right?
I would NOT expect you to take ANY actions whatsoever. I would watch my monkey to the level of attention required - i.e padded room = no supervision, the proverbial “china shop” = sitting on my lap all day:)
I would also appreciate a warning from the host of any parts of the house that are off limits, or any particular dangers I may not be aware of (eg: yep the yard is fenced but there is a big hole behind the rose bush) so that I know to be cautious of those areas…
And I with a passion “over parenting” - we don’t even have safety plugs in our own house, so I would not expect anyone else to install them especially for my visit.
Have a conversation with manthous tonight in which I give him a “job”: manthous is hereby in charge of communicating with the parents (it’s his family anyway) about the need to keep an eye on their kid while at our house, and manthous is also hereby in charge of coordinating any “adjustments” to household knick-knacks upon their arrival.
It is my problem no longer. If their kid gets hurt, he can deal with it.
Wheew! Now I can focus on the meal and on entertaining our guests.
bengangmo, I wish there were more parents like you…
My eight month old is zooming all over the place now, but is still too young to be trusted at all. This Christmas if we are visiting child-free homes I will keep her close to me at all times - on my lap, on the floor beside me, in her pram - and that’s reasonable for shorter visits. However, it’s not practical to think I can do that all December at a place I visit a lot (like my parent’s house) so our plan at the moment is to put the Christmas tree in a playpen. She can still have free movement around the lounge room and interact with everyone else and we don’t have to worry about her getting into the tree.
I’ll probably have to do something similar at home. There’s not a lot of room here, so I can’t really set the tree up some place out of her reach. I’d rather have it up than not, so the playpen might be the go.
As a parent of twin toddlers right now, I don’t think that needs to be said. If we bring our kids somewhere, it’s our job to keep an eye on them. That said, if we’re visiting family, I would hope for some accommodation. You don’t need to rearrange your house or spend hours baby-proofing, but it would be nice if you would remove, or at least warn me about, anything unusually dangerous that is within a small child’s reach. Similarly, I might not expect you to “babysit,” but I’d probably assume that you would at least keep an eye out for anything amiss (“Hey, I think your kid just put a marble in his mouth.”)
My advice would be to focus on one area where you expect the child to spend most of her time. Note that, for a toddler, at least in my experience, this will probably be wherever the parents are spending their time. If you can remove the breakables and sharp objects from that area, and then keep the kid corralled there, you should be OK.
If the tree is not in the main room, I think you’re fine as long as the room the tree is in has a shuttable door, and you’re prepared to allow the parents to shut it occasionally it their kid happens to develop a tree obsession. Or ask the parents if they’ve got a playpen they could bring to put around it.
What wouldn’t be reasonable (and it doesn’t sound like this is the case) would be expecting the toddler to spend large amounts of time in the same room as a shiny object like a christmas tree, with no physical barriers in the way, and not touch it. As long as it can be out of sight out of mind - no problem.
I don’t think it matters if the tree is decorated or not. One-year-olds shouldn’t be let loose at undecorated trees either, unless you want the lower branches stripped of their pine-needles and trampled all over your floor
Just realised I should probably ask - do you know how old this kid is exactly? I tend to mentally define “toddler” as “one-year-old” - after that they’re “preschoolers” to me - and have been basing my answers on that. I know others have wider definitions. A well-behaved two-year-old probably can be told simply “don’t touch that” and be expected to obey, as long as the parents have an eye out (and as long as there aren’t legions of interesting breakable “don’t touch that” things all over the house)
Just lock them in a closet. Their parents aren’t watching them anyway, so they probably won’t be missed. Put some food and water in there, and make sure it’s not your closet with your guns or your pr0n.
) surface for guests stuff that they don’t want interfered with.
