I jsut went over to my brother's house and noticed it was different. The other day their baby took his first steps and now the house is totaly child safe. All the cabnits have those annoying locks, and it seems like they moved half of their stuff so the baby cant get it.

its pretty annoying for me.

o well

yup, my wife and I went through the same thing. We had to be extra careful not to leave anything lying around that could hurt our child.

I child proofed, but I also looked at things like my furniture. I put my coffee table away because it had pointy edges. I could see my daughter falling into the table and hitting the edge of it. Ya, she could still hurt herself just falling on the floor, but 4 less pointy edges were four less accidents waiting to happen.

DCMerkle

I look at it this way. It only takes the child one time to learn that he can get hurt. We kept ours out of the kitchen of course, but didn't lock every single thing possible. That is a little extreme.

We aren't that extreme. We have a gate in our kitchen and a few locks on few things, nothing major.

The things you learn after your first child! I don't do the extreme home baby proof anymore either with my second. Once she is about and crawling/walking more, we will get a gate. I have never been away from my child (either of the two) without a gate up, or them in a pen they can not get out of, so we are not going to get all the locks and everything just yet.

I'm all for extreme proofing if you can. It wasn't feasible for us though, we just couldn't afford the stuff. lol We were so broke we often questioned where our next meal was coming from or if rent would be paid. So we made do with what we could and our little man has survived to almost 4. I'm not sure I'LL survive his childhood, but I'm pretty sure he will.

We never did all that. Just let our kids explore on their own under our watchful eye. We did not have much furniture though. So we might have moved any tables with corners. We just did not have all the kinds of safety things you kids have these days.