10 September 2005

Tot Loks

CFO's post on childproofing got me thinking about when we were childproofing our house, and the item that has had the best bang for the buck.

We went with Tot Loks when we installed cabinet locks. This turned out to be a wonderful investment, since Boo was opening traditional cabinet locks as soon as he could reach them. He still hasn't figured out how to open the Tot Loks, although he has tried a few times to open the cabinets with a marshmallow.

A few words of warning with the Tot Loks:

  1. The Tot Lok starter kit comes with a guide to keep you from drilling a hole through your cabinet door. This guide slips. And where you would put your Tot Lok is not necessarily the same place you would want to put a decorative cabinet knob.
  2. The metal in the lock part of the Tot Loks is not always of consistent magnet-receptive quality, meaning some of the locks don't work as well as the others. This can be solved by adding some extra metal inside the lock hole to provide extra conductivity. I wish I could tell you exactly how to go about this, but after I drilled a hole through the first cabinet I tried to install a lock in, I called upon someone more home-improvement savvy than I and had her install them, and she figured out the problem with the metal.
  3. You WILL want replacement keys, they disappear at the most inconvenient times. I've found it increasingly difficult to just buy replacement keys - Home Depot and Lowe's don't carry them anymore, and I haven't been able to find them online. There is a company named Rev-A-Shelf that makes a very similar key, though, and they are a good three or four bucks cheaper than the Tot Lok keys.
  4. Don't store your spare replacement keys in a cabinet that is locked.

08 September 2005

Please let me SLEEP

How sleep-deprived is someone when they finally fall off to sleep and what they dream about is being able to sleep?

I've had this gack for ten days now that keeps me up all night coughing. Everyone else I know got over it in five. Since I'm pregnant, there's nothing I can really take for it - my doctor said that Sudafed was OK, and I was taking it along with Tylenol for the sinus headache, until I came across this article. I really don't like having to double-check everything my doctor says, and it's not like she's a newbie to what to take and not take since she has a one-year-old. Normally I love my doctor. I am seeing her (a GP) rather than a perinatologist, which I could ask for and get a referral to with no problem because of my PIH/pre-eclampsia when I was pregnant with Boo but I feel we have a good relationship. I'm irked right now, though.

05 September 2005

Long time no blog.

Vacations illness stuff...

Here are some random notes from the past month or so.

The little milestones sometimes matter so much more than the big ones. My husband taught my 3-year-old son that vomit goes into the toilet. This means A LOT to me.

In St. Louis, it takes four people to figure out how to do anything, including how to print a receipt for a rental car and how to get a price check on a pair of shorts. Or maybe it only takes four people when your toddler is exhausted because it's crazy late or really upset and just had an accident.

The Verizon Wireless "Can you hear me now" dude apparently has not been to large parts of rural Missouri.

There are no gas stations close to the Alamo/National rental dropoff in downtown Chicago.

Caves are not necessarily a good time for a 3-year-old.

When we visited the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, my first thought was "It'd be really cool to BASE jump off of that!" even though I've never BASE jumped and never particularly had the urge. (Skydiving, yes, but BASE jumping is a little too risky.) When we got to the top, the windows were so tiny that there's no way a normal adult could squeeze through them, but I was still intrigued by the idea, so I asked one of the guards. He seemed rather offended that I asked, but said that one person had done it but was caught. I asked how the guy got out, and he wouldn't tell me, but said the guy didn't go up the outside. Apparently that wasn't true.