Gated Communities and Lockdown

Well, I am back! Today this entry is about Joey and his "gated community"! Joey lives in a gated community within our house, we have taken great measures to keep Joey in and out of certain areas! We have 3 child gates, one to keep him out of the dining room and the school cupboard, where all the pencils, markers, and crayons are. Plus, all the kids' papers and homework--a very bad place for Joey to be! My kids need a t-shirt that says "my brother ate my homework"! We have another gate to keep Joey out of the hallway and the staircase to the upstairs. With these two gates in place, Joey has free roam of the kitchen and family room. That usually is where we spend a lot of our time: dishes, meals, laundry, cleaning.....He still gets into things but they are either already ruined or are tough enough to withstand the JOEY. (by the way, Joey is 2) Keeping Joey off the stairs is a safety issue, we are teaching him how to use the stairs but he still thinks standing up and playing half way down is a good idea, even though he almost always loses his balance. So he is only on the stairs with supervision! The third gate is upstairs and is used to keep Joey in his room. He has a very nice room with lots of toys and since his doorway is 5 feet from the stairs, when we are upstairs he has to be gated into his room. He actually has fun in there and loves to throw all the toys in his room over the gate, and if his throw is good, the toys hit the stairs and roll all the way down! He loves this! Unfortunately the bottom of those stairs is right at the front door, so I must always pick up after those sessions so that people coming to our house don't break their neck on the pile of toys at the front door! Several times a day Joey goes into "lockdown" stage, it is very nice when he is hungry because I can buckle him into his highchair and he will stay contained for a 1/2 hour or so and eat. He tries to get out but to no avail! I do have to make sure that he is far enough away from the patio door that is in the kitchen, this morning he was eating chocolate chip pancakes (chocolate makes everything better!) and he smeared chocolate ALL over the patio door, very messy! So I pulled him further away and got out the all-purpose cleaner and cleaned the door. My time with him in the highchair is very valuable, that is when I do things like fold laundry and mop the floor! Since there is no way to keep Joey out of the kitchen, (it's a big open space with an island)my sweet husband took the time to put "babyproof" latches on ALL the cupboards and drawers. College degrees come in handy when reading directions for all things child related! Before the latches, that was Joey's favorite place, he would empty the food cupboard into the sink, the towel drawer into the silverware and the silverware into the cupboard below it! Also, half of those items missed where he was trying to put them and landed on the floor! So now there are latches on everything and we have had a training session with the other children on how to open things and our messes by Joey have been reduced by half! :) We love Joey and he is so happy and funny and now we can even laugh more with him because we know where he is!