Mr. Happy is just racing along the floor these days.
Mr. Charm is happily eating some of his safe foods – foods which are NOT safe for Mr. Happy. He is also 2 and has no real awareness of crumbs.
Mama is going NUTS.
I’m going to change my name to Cinderella because I spend so much time every day sweeping and vacuuming the floors!
As I usually do when faced with frustrating situations, I looked at this and thought “How can I work smarter, not harder?”
Well, the answer is: BABY GATES.
Mr. Charm broke us in very well. Our house is now almost entirely ‘baby-proof’ (if not toddler-proof!). So we had packed away the baby gates and thrown them up in the attic last summer; they weren’t needed any longer.
We got them down weekend before last and installed them.
Our kitchen and dining room are sort of attached, and they are smack dab in the middle of the house. So we set up a gate across the wide entryway from the dining room to the living room.
When we’re eating, we close off the gates to the living room. No entry or exit until the food is eaten, put away, table is wiped, and floors are swept. And Mr. Happy cannot crawl in the kitchen and dining room when the gate is up.
When the gates are open, the house still has a good flow to it and Mr. Happy can crawl anywhere. But it all comes to a grinding halt when food comes out.
The kitchen and dining room are now “crawl-free” zones when food is out.
The rest of the house is now a “food-free” zone at all times.
I hope it works. I’m tired of panicking every time I see a crumb. And I’m REALLY tired of swiping food out of Mr. Happy’s mouth. No matter how many times I sweep, the child is an absolute MAGNET for dropped food!
Oh, and we had to hang the broom up high on the wall. Mr. Happy kept – get this – eating the bristles!
For starters – ew. Secondly, I sweep up everything with that broom. God only knows what contamination he’s consuming by eating the broom!
Strange child.
This better work. I hate the idea that I put more holes in my wall for nothing. Not to mention I really need Mr. Happy at baseline.
How do you keep your allergic child safe from stray food?
This is mostly random, but on the general theme of “things teething babies eat”, one of my kid brothers found a large source of water-cooled smooth shiny porcelain that was *exactly* to his tastes when he was teething … yup, you guessed it, his teething surface of choice was the toilet bowl! I do not think Mum has every cleaned the loo so much in her *life* as she did those few months!!
Ugh. Yuck. Poor MUM!!