keep out of reach

If I were a cartoonist, here’s the cartoon I would draw: I am standing in the middle of my kitchen, holding a small plastic bottle. All the bottom cabinets are empty, their contents around my feet on the floor. On top of the fridge, on top of the cabinets, and on hooks hung way up close to the ceiling is stuffed everything I own in the world. Teetering on the edge of one counter, reaching for the piled-up stuff on the fridge, is a mischievous toddler. But here’s the punch line-in big letters, on the bottle in my hand, is written, “KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.”

Riiiight.

Oh, wait. I could just take a picture of real life. Is there, on all the earth, such a place as “out of reach of children”? Keys, for instance. I have a three-year-old with a key fetish. The hooks on the wall where I hang my purses are easy pickings for a guy with chair-pushing abilities. So I hung a little row of hooks in my kitchen as high as I could reach. (Any higher, and I’d be pushing a chair.) So he pushes a chair, gets a broom, and fishes with it until he lifts the keys off the hook. Then, of course, he can go unlock the car and play with all the power mirrors and seat adjustments. On a good day, I get in the car after him and find all my settings messed up. On a hot day, I find him in there with his curls dripping with sweat and his cheeks scarlet-pink. So the key hiding goes on. On top of the fridge, no good, on top of the cabinets, mostly good. Except that everything else in the house is also up there.

Like the broom. I came home after an evening of hauling kids to lessons to find that my husband had cleaned the whole kitchen. Except the floor. “Where on earth is the broom?” he asked. I pointed upward. It was right above his head on top of the cabinets. “Oh,” he said, defeated, “I didn’t look up.” We buy a new bottle of baby soap about once a week, because we haven’t found a place where they can’t find it and pour it out all over the bathroom floor. One of these weeks we’ll get smart and buy trial size.

I’m not sure if it’s “just boys” or “just” my kids, or if all parents are actually reeling in disbelief at the disorder their children can create, but I do know that this particular set of kids can climb and/or destroy anything. A particularly nasty item in the “out of reach” joke is the number of “childproofing” products available to help you. So you naively purchase cabinet locks, and diligently install them, and carefully line up your toxic (and expensive) cleaning products in the new safe place you’ve created. Turn your back, satisfied with a job well done, and in five minutes you’ll be on the phone to Poison Control. (I actually considered keeping San Diego Poison Control on speed dial when I moved to Georgia, since they wouldn’t find me when they finally decided I’d called them one too many times and came for my kids.)

Maybe we should just build a shelf about a foot down from the ceiling all the way around every room in the house, and shove it full of everything that should be out of reach. Then we’ll remove all climb-able furniture from anywhere near the walls, remove all long, fishing-type items from the house, take away anything that they can throw to bounce things down…..

So I look at all that stuff up there, and shrug, and hand the Tylenol bottle over to the toddler. It makes a good rattle, and whoever made their childproof lids actually did a pretty decent job. At least now I know he has it. And right there in his chubby little hands, that’s as close as it’ll ever get to being “out of reach of children”.