Toddler Proofing - An Ongoing Nightmare!

This morning I woke up to the sweet smell of the oven. WHAT? THE OVEN?

Cue panicked jump off the couch (yes I was sleeping on the couch), and shout to the kitchen where I heard MUCH giggling.

This is not something you want to hear at any point but this is what my 3 ½ year old said. “Mom, we’re just putting chocolates and paper in the oven!” Just in case I didn’t get it the first time, 2 ½ year old mockingbird repeats it.

I ran to the kitchen which was only about 10 feet from where I lay resting a little too soundly on the couch but I couldn’t get to that kitchen fast enough! Apparently, since they had been at it a while.

With chocolate all over their faces, and in the oven, which was set to 350C on convection and turned on… they were having a grand old time.

Thankfully the oven had hardly started heating up and neither of them was inside of it, which crossed my mind as I ran through a list of all the awful things that “could have” happened.

I swore in "exclamation" (oopsie!), I almost cried, I was quite distraught, which caused Elijah to cry and go directly to his room and Isaac to ask “why” 8000 times when I quickly said “you never never never ever touch the stove without mommy or daddy!!!” in my most “I mean business” sort of voice.

I know neither of them really got the full reason why it wasn’t ok. We felt that the stove was hot inside, we talked about fires (their aunt and uncle recently went through a house fire and Elijah especially talks about it a lot still.). I tried really hard to explain everything but I know cognitively they are not ready to understand it to it’s full extent and it is my responsibility to protect them from this danger that had never even crossed my mind.

In the same way that I put special covers on the outlet plug ins, a baby gate at the top of the stairs, and car seats in the van, I needed to come up with a most excellent plan to keep the kids out of the oven.

First I had to figure out how my children determined how to turn on an oven with a rather complicated system. They would have had to press “convection bake” followed by 3 - 5 - 0, and finally “start.” None of these buttons are that close together that it would be easy to figure out. Were my children evil geniuses like Mega Mind?

Fast forward to end of day.

Chase came home from work and we chatted about the experience of the morning. I asked him how he thought they’d figured out what buttons to press. Chase said, “uh… they helped me bake something yesterday and I let them push the stove buttons.” BINGO! One time being shown and they remembered.

I wasn’t upset with Chase over this one. He taught me two valuable lessons via the kids.

1. We need to be on the ball as parents. There are risks EVERYWHERE, and we need to control as many as we can in our own house. I was doing my job in the day to supervise the kids, but I did not take all the precautions necessary to safeguard my house and children in the night. I sleep on the couch to ensure I get up as soon as they do, but sometimes, as I learned today, even that isn’t enough to do the trick.

2. Our children are amazing and wonderful creatures! Imagine that, being shown ONE TIME, and they remembered a complicated system of buttons to start the oven! Let that be a lesson to us that we have an incredible job teaching these beautiful little people everything we know and helping them to find ways to learn everything we don’t know!

What I do know is that my kids know how to set the oven on convection at 350C. I guess they want to learn more about baking. What a learning opportunity for “safe oven use.” I have some work ahead of me to “re-toddler proof,” but in the meantime, I’ll be unplugging my oven at night.

Melted chocolate anyone?