Yeah, NOW it's a funny story

Recently we have begun the dreaded process of house hunting. At first it's kind of a fun, exciting process, imagining all the possibilities, looking at pictures of houses online. Then you actually start to go look at houses and the excitement wanes pretty fast; at least in our little market it does. But the overinflated prices of old homes in serious need of repair in a town that somehow didn't burst with the the rest of the country's housing bubble is a topic for another time.

Something that I've noticed as we've looked at different housing options is what a different lens I see things through these days. It's the Ellie lens. I mean sure, there's always the basic childproof concerns about stairs, banisters (or lack thereof in the case of one house we saw), doors (Charlie is already opening doors and it's upending my life right now), knobs for the stove burners down low where the baby can reach and turn them on instead of up behind the range (who does that?!), that kind of thing. But life with Ellie has certainly opened our eyes to what is even possible to need childproofing. We'd notice in some houses some nice features like built-in bookshelves, which I think are great, but through the Ellie lens all I see are ladders and a challenge (currently all our books and bookcases are tucked away in the guest bedroom with a childproof handle on the door). A built-in desk seems like a nice feature, and Brady made the comment that we would have to get a nice big desk chair to go with it if we had that. After a moment's pause we both looked at each other and added, "someday," both envisioning the added climbing benefit such a chair would offer, not to mention all the adventures if the thing were on wheels. Someday.

Thinking on all this, I realized I never did record our classic Ellie climbing/getting into mischief/childproofing fail to date. The last person I told the story to asked me if I'd written it down, telling me I wouldn't want to forget it. I told her I was waiting for the trauma to settle, wanted to make sure no one would call the law on me, and does anyone really forget such moments?

When we were first moving into our current house and setting up the kitchen, I expressed some concern to Brady about leaving all the knives out on the counter in the big wooden knife block. This is the same knife set that, after he had tried them out for the first time and I asked him how they were, he described as, "one-and-a-half thumbs up!" holding up a newly bandaged thumb. Brady likes a sharp knife for cooking. But Brady thought they'd be fine on the counter and said we'd want them accessible.

One morning last fall I decided it would be nice to take the kids to story time at the library. They were both playing in the living room, so I ran back to the bedroom to just throw on some clothes really fast so we could go. While back there, I could hear that they had made their way to the kitchen and thought they had gotten into the cupboard with the tupperware (which is also childproofed now). No big deal, I thought. It would take two minutes to clean up. So I hurried to finish getting ready and headed back out. What I found was not tupperware on the floor. Ellie, for the first time, had climbed up onto the counter, and Charlie had crawled to the floor right below her. Ellie was pulling knives out of the block and dropping them on the floor below, blade first, one at a time. The block was almost completely empty. Charlie was holding two steak knives by the blades and waving them over his head, sitting in a pile of fillet, chef's, and other assorted knives. Ellie sat crouched in her own little pile of knives.

For half a second I couldn't even process what I was looking at, both my children smiling up at me, wielding these sharp, shiny instruments of death. It's one of those frozen moments where you can't think how to respond. Sometimes those moments call for taking a picture. Sometimes that would just be evidence for child protective services. After my half second of shock, I gingerly stepped over the knives, pried the two out of Charlie's hands, and removed him from the  kitchen. Then I did the same for Ellie. I grabbed a big bucket, rounded up knives and dropped them in, put everything in the pantry (which already did have a childproof doorknob at this point), and breathed huge sigh of relief that no one was hurt. Luckily, we ended up at story time still and not the ER. Can you imagine trying to answer those questions? "Well, see, the kids have this knife-throwing act, and usually Ellie's aim is spot on, but this time Charlie must have flinched or something. He's usually not so nervous, but you know how 10-month-olds can be . . ." (Incidentally, most of the knives still live in the pantry; just the chef's knife and the paring knife stay out in the kitchen because they get used multiple times a day, but they have good, protective sheathes and aren't out on the counter. Still . . .)

Now it's a funny story. Kind of. Funny for all of you who aren't constantly pulling this three-and-a-half-year-old off the counters, out of the cupboards. We have more and more empty cupboards in our house these days, and a pantry that is getting fuller and fuller. Sorry I don't have pictures of this. I also don't have pictures of the kitchen floor after Ellie discovered I hadn't put the syrup bottle away after we had pancakes for breakfast (sometimes I don't think that linoleum is ever going to fully recover).

I do have pictures of the time she made a snowstorm. Early this past winter I was in one room with Charlie when I heard Ellie yelling, "It's snowing! It's snowing!" I thought it was odd since I didn't think the forecast called for it. Then I saw that Ellie had reached a full box of tissues. (Pretty sure that one is right out the the Ramona books.) Now the tissues stay up in a cupboard that Ellie usually leaves alone.

Hopefully our new house will have lots of good hiding places.