Baby Gates

What's wrong with this picture?!?!?

June 2007

Baby gates are wonderful. I say that, but we don't have any up. We actually only used baby gates for Charlie for about a month. We kept the triplets contained in the family room and kitchen areas in our house until they were about 2 years old. I thought for sure that we would do the same thing with Charlie. But, as everyone always says, having a single baby is definitely not the same thing as having triplets.


In a few ways, it was actually easier keeping the triplets "locked up" because at that time, it was only them. They were "the action" so, even if I left them in the gated area for a couple of minutes by themselves, there was still a lot of activity and they weren't exactly lonely in there. With Charlie, when we had the gates, he was in there by himself most of the time. He HATED that!! He would just hang at the gate and cry when his brothers left. He is definitely a man that likes to be around the action! The other problem that we had that caused us to stop using the gates with Charlie was that the big boys could not properly open and close them. It was really a pain (x3) to have to keep opening and closing the gates every time one of them wanted to get out, or back in, or back out again....you get the idea. For a while, I actually would set one of the pressure gates about 12 inches off of the ground. That way, the big boys could crawl under, but it took Charlie a while to figure it out. LOL!! Needless to say, it didn't take THAT long for him figure it out, especially after a few private lessons with Ben. Why Ben thought it would be so cool to teach Charlie that trick is beyond me!

June 2007

Charlie: "Dad, whatcha doin'"

Anyway, I could not come up with a good solution to our gate problem so, I took the gates down. Again, having one baby is very different that having three and this time, it proved to be much, much easier. When the boys were very little, opening the gates was a big free-for-all. They would just scatter in three different directions. Something my mom would call "a disaster". (Inside joke - Hi Mom!!) But seriously, it was pretty difficult and a bit stressful trying to corral them. Just like a cartoon, as soon as you would get one, he would take off while you were finding the other two, and so on, and so on. Fortunately/Unfortunately, with Charlie I have the complete opposite problem. He is my little shadow. He literally follows me wherever I go. I really don't have much of a worry of him getting into things that he is not supposed to because he is always right behind me blabbering away.



Why am I writing about this? Well, Charlie apparently doesn't like my blog, or anything else I do on the computer...a baby gate sure would come in handy about now. :)