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Need eyes in the back of your head? Constantly watching your little one as he waddles off to explore… Oh! the joys of motherhood when you have a little one on the move.

Sometimes I sit back and reminisce about the good old days. Those halcyon, calm times before my son became mobile. Back when he used to lie on his back, waving his arms gently, content to gaze at the various toys I held up for him to look at, and I could leave the room and come back to find him in exactly the same place.

I definitely took delight in those first sideways rolls, and snapped a thousand pictures as he unsteadily figured out how to sit up. My parents received a triumphant video of little Raff caterpillaring his way across the living room the week he started doing that at around the seven month mark.

Nowadays he is well and truly on the move, slinking across the floor on his belly like a champion, awkwardly crawling and pulling himself up to standing using whatever  will support his weight. He gets this crazed giggle when he sets his sights on something he wants to investigate, and puffs and pants till he gets there.

While I’m still thrilled with each new milestone, holy cow life just got harder.

My problem is – you could line up fifty beautiful toys, designed specifically for babies his age, which all play delightful tunes and aid his development in front of him, then throw a rusty screwdriver at the furthest far end, turn around once in a circle and he will be sitting up with that screwdriver either in his mouth or perilously close to his eye.

My little bubba seems to have zero interest in cuddlies or Fisher Price activity stations that light up or even the lovely coloured building blocks that the girls around the corner gave him. He only wants to play with the things that I don’t want him to have. It’s a desperate race most mornings to keep him away from the dog’s water bowl before he upends it all over himself and I’ve given up and just taken the batteries out of the TV remote so he can gnaw away on it to his heart’s content.

Raff is definitely not going to succumb to being deposited in a playpen for any length of time so my days are pretty much filled with chasing him around the house and making sure he doesn’t topple over, get his fingers caught in anything, that he doesn’t pull things over on top of himself (dining chair – surprise!) and most of all, that the wrong kind of object doesn’t end up in his mouth.

In his world there are only two types of things – food and not food, and everything must be investigated to determine which category they fall into. There’s really only so much child proofing one can do and so far this week I’ve stopped him from eating a lump of charcoal, an old vitamin tablet that had rolled under the fridge, the dog’s tail and the leg of a dead huntsman spider that was shrivelled up behind the tv cabinet. I didn’t quite make it to prise all of the storybook page that he was chewing on out of his mouth before he swallowed a little bit, and yes he drank some soapy bathwater, but fortunately so far I haven’t noticed any side effects from either.

I think I’ve got about three years to go until I can stop watching him constantly – so until then, does anyone know where I can buy a pair of eyes for the back of my head?

What have you had to stop your child from eating??

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  • This sounds so stressful haha what a cute little tornado

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  • That’s why we keep remotes up on top of the TV Cabinet we have. Batteries are a huge issue. I hope if you give them to kids to play with that you also stick the lid where the batteries go in very tightly so they can’t do themselves any harm with it or any battery residue in it.

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  • when they do start crawling and rolling around, is when you hav to be so vigilant about the floor cleanliness. when you have other children in the house, this becomes a real job! constant vacumming

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  • Isn’t it funny that we buy all these toys but it’s the dogs dirty dish or something similar that holds their attention.

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  • Time to put away those easy to reach objects, they love to explore :)

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  • My 14 week old has just started rolling even though it’s a long way off crawling the fun has begun!!

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  • little pieces of wool coming out of carpet. my bub vomited it twice. its all sorted now

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  • lol but its great fun also watching them explore there world

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  • it is such an exciting, and scary, time as they can start reaching everything and finding the one thing you’ve missed putting up higher

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  • Having twins on the move normally going in the opposite directions was very, very , very hard, especially as my son was a runner when ever my back was turned for a millisecond.

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  • I used to have one of those very old-fashioned wooden play-pens, and I’d often put it on a blanket on the lawn, and pop Bub into it with some toys. I nearly had a heart attack the day I turned around to find him trying to put a small beetle into his mouth.

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  • Everything needs to move up slightly out of reach each month! Then they grow taller and you have to move it up some more! Lol

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  • Interesting and some useful information.

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  • lock everything up when the baby gets going

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  • mine has now discovered that she can pull the card out of the digital tv box!

    Reply

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