Smash Them again! That’ll teach those pans!
So as Ronan gets increasingly mobile, we have to babyproof. This means we lock everything up with safety locks that mostly annoy us and for now cause him to be disinterested in what’s behind the locked door.
We have a lock on the oven, a lock on the two doors of the bathroom cabinets, the double-door kitchen sink cabinet, and the doors of the upright cabinet from Ikea. Installing them took some doing – they come in one basic design, and it’s not evident how to put it on cabinets with widely varying designs. The upright was hardest, the right-angle lock receiver only stuck on one side. The solution was to stick one receiver to the other receiver, so that the receivers were stuck to each other as well as the cabinet door frame. I just read that paragraph, and I’m sure you have no idea what I’m talking about. But trust me, that was the hard one, and now even adults can’t open the left door without opening the right one first, because both door locks were made for the receiver to face one way, and because they’re stuck together, one faces the wrong way, making the lock open inside the cabinet, which is inconvenient. Try it out the next time you visit.
In fact, the whole thing is inconvenient, because at 2 AM, you really want to get a new roll of toilet paper without accidentally ripping the bathroom cabinet apart, which is what I’m going to do if I fail to remember that those doors are now locked. Plus, the bathroom cabinet is so old, total destruction is easy. (And it’s ugly. But telling your landlady “We locked the door, and Jason doesn’t know his own strength, so in the middle of the night, he accidentally ripped the doors off the hinges, so please buy us a new one. Oh, and the old one is ugly” doesn’t work really. She won’t accept “the bathroom cabinet is ugly” as an excuse for accidental early morning remodeling, and I’m too broke to afford to replace the sink, which is embedded in the top of the cabinet.)
Ronan seems unfazed by our attempts to thwart his exploration. Cabinet locked? Move on. Cabinet locked? Move on. Yes, he might play with the door, get some enjoyment out of the door popping out of his hands and back into the door frame, but he quickly moves on.
The one cabinet that was left unlocked was the one holding our pots and pans. The dear readers who have children know that toddlers love pots and pans. Ronan did not discover our pots and pans until we had locked down our apartment, but pots and pans may be the best thing ever. EVER.
He loves to sit and just bang them on the kitchen tile floor. Or bang them together. Or bang them, one in each hand, on the floor and then on each other. As long as they are making lots of noise.
Of course, he seems to find the best moment when I have the least amount of energy. He either bangs them when I’ve just woken up, or when we’re winding down for the evening. But mostly when I’ve just woken up.
I don’t know if pots and pans toys are going to be an ongoing interest, but already they are cleaner than ever. Since I was stunted as a child with a life-long hatred of doing dishes (we would sit around the dinner table, recounting our miseries – whomever had the worst day got out of doing dishes. My brother, who is generally happy and less depressed as an adult than I am, always had the best excuse for getting out of dishes. And he’s reading this and will kill me for saying so. DEAD.) Terry does the dishes in the family. But that arrangement may have to be renegotiated – as she is now washing all the pots and pans in the house every night, even if I’ve only used a few of them to cook. Ronan has pulled out all the rest and smashed them together until they are good and admonished for being inanimate objects.
Of course, he doesn’t think of them that way – they are just fun things that make lots of noise, so let’s make lots of noise – which is not going to bode well for me. It’s a good thing that I’m broke – I can barely stand the noise when I’m just awakened – but I imagine it would be much worse if I were hung over. I have been known, once a fortnight, to enjoy a good round or four at the local pub (which, usually, is six miles away, in Manhattan) before taking the Q train home. I shudder to think what that incessant pounding would be like after a well-enjoyed night out with friends.
But, luckily I’m too poor to drink right now. With any luck, Ronan will grow out of his pot-banging phase before I have enough income to start liquidating it again.
(Terry is laughing at me as she reads this, because she knows that my nights out with friends will probably come before Ronan outgrows banging pots together.)