Monday, October 21, 2013

Child Proofing My Cabinet

I bought this cabinet for extra storage space after my second daughter was born. As I knew toddlers like to explore and open doors of cabinets and drawers, I purposely requested the furniture shop owner not to install any handles on the cabinet doors and drawers. We adults would just open doors and drawers by grabbing the sides. Worked fine for us for a few years because my girls never bothered with the 'doors that cannot be opened'.

Came my son Yang who was even more curious with never give up attitude. He was very interested with the doors and would spend time studying the opening at the sides. One day, he managed to pry open the doors and there was no turning back since. He would open the doors time to time and take everything that looked fun to him. Baking utensils, snacks that I bought but want to 'hide' from the children before giving them, pasta, can food, containers etc. Smacking and reprimanding him was not effective at all at this curious stage.

I was not keen to install those child proof thingy looks ugly and since Yang would probably be the last baby in my house, I did not want to waste money and space later to store those things. I came out with a very simple but effective solution. To turn the doors and drawers side of the cabinet facing the wall but the ugly plywood side would be facing us.

 Before

Luckily, it was very easy to solve as I had been to a 'DIY shop' very frequently and there were all sorts of unique stuff that could help solve our organizing and home improvement problems. I bought 2 rolls of wood patterned adhesive paper to co-ordinate with the cabinet surface at the front and sides.  I spent one night measuring and sticking and came out with nicer looking back of a cabinet. I bought some fruit stickers and pasted on surface to distract my son from discovering the sides of the adhesive paper and starting to peel them off.

 After

He was a bit annoyed for the first few days because he knew the doors had been turned to the other side. He tried to slip his arms at the gap between wall and cupboard but no avail. I distracted him by teaching him names of fruit on the stickers. So he started learning 'Nemon' for lemon and 'Memon' for water-melon. Mummy won this round. Ha! Ha!

It worked fine for me as the things stored inside were those I need only once in a while. I would need to move the cabinet out to get my things but it was a lot better then having Yang opening the doors every hour.


Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Totally Weaned

Yang was totally weaned off breast milk end of May 2013. So this is a very back dated post. I just want to jot this down as a closure of my previous post 'Weaning in Progress'.

Drinking his last bottle of breast milk

It was an easy transition. Probably due to hubby's involvement in making him sleep at night so Yang did not relate dad with 'milk'. As I weaned him off slowly, there was no problem for me as well. I just prolong duration between pumping sessions (pumping only when necessary) and after a few days, milk supply disappeared.

I felt free (although with some guilt involved as some mothers were diligent enough to extend breastfeeding as long as possible). I managed to spend more quality time with my girls at night when hubby brought Yang to sleep. I accompanied them doing their homework, reading from books and kids encyclopedia, drawing lots and lots of pictures, chatting with them and teaching them to pray with me before sleep. I became more patient with them with less yelling and threatening. Yang grew up to be happy, healthy and very active.

 He wants to do whatever his sisters are doing.

 Playing with our pots and utensils is his favorite past time. Toys are just not good enough.

Since he likes climbing so much, we bring the kids to playground to spend their energy.

In conclusion, we were all happy. Hubby said I was more stressed when breastfeeding because I did not have enough time to do what I wanted. Then I felt guilty because of not doing them. 15-16 months of breastfeeding was good enough, he said.