Bungee Babysitter

I got to thinking about baby proofing our home. About 95% of our home is baby safe, the problems are the one metre around the TV, the one metre around the wine rack, the 10cm around each plug, etc. So I got to thinking, what about doing things the other way around, instead of changing things to prevent the baby from getting hurt, what about just preventing the baby from getting there?

If you look at any room, at least half is already baby safe, so limit the baby to that half of the room and suddenly your whole house is baby safe. The problem is limiting the baby. Fences are effective, but are more likely to result in you tripping over them and breaking an ankle, or worse spilling a beer.

So being a true yachty, when presented with how to secure something, I thought of bungee cord. The idea is very simple, in each room you determine the area which is the safest, attach a hook to the wall with a piece of bungee short enough to keep the baby in the safe zone. Get your baby a harnes and clip them to the bungee. If they crawl towards the wine rack, the bungee will gradually give them more and more resistance until they are stopped, no sudden jerks, just a gentle disuasion.

As you move around the house you unclip the baby from the bungee in one room and clip it onto the bungee in the next. This also has the added advantage of localising the toy dispersal to the safe zone.

Just one reminder, unclip the baby before taking it to the next room or you may suddenly find the little sprog shooting from your arms back into the safe zone. The first time this happens you may think you have an olympic sprinter on your hands as your little darling goes dashing back to the safe zone, however, the imprint left on the wall will soon dispel this myth.

The best part is this is also truly portable. A stake hammered into the grass will make any garden suddenly a baby safe area. Going to a friends house and you don't want take the drilling machine along to attach the hooks to the walls? Simply loop the bungee around the leg of a chair or table. Voilla!

The possibilities are limitless. A teenage model doesn't use bungee, but a steel cable (a couple of kilometres long) attached to a winch. They can go out in the evening and at curfew the winch starts, within minutes your teenager is back home safe and sound.

This parenting isn't so hard, it just requires a little thought, planning and ingenuity!