Foiled

We have a lot of bookshelves, and Evelyn thinks that pulling the books off of them is almost as fun as pulling on computer power cords or playing the the dog's water dish, so Ben and I have gotten pretty tired of telling her no and redirecting her. Today I finally googled ways to baby proof bookshelves, and a lot of the answers were unhelpful. Apparently tying bicycle inner tubes to the shelves is quite popular? Who keeps their old inner tubes around? Or are people buying new ones? They're not that cheap... Others were velcroing material over the shelf opening, but the youth in this house are pretty dexterous and strong-fingered, so that just sounded like creating a new fun activity to do before pulling all the books off... and also a ton of work for me.

Anyway, after a bit of digging, I found a few people using an approach that requires zero tools or materials. My kind of solution! You just cram the bottom shelves so full of books that even adults have trouble pulling them out. When Evelyn crawled over to try to get the books out after I'd finished, and couldn't, I may have uttered a smug "ha!" at her, because that's the always-graceful, supportive kind of mom that I am.

What I imagine Evelyn's bookshelf view is like. The other nice thing about this way of baby proofing is that it doesn't make the shelves look weird.