Shameless Endorsement

Grace has been toddling around the house for a while now. First crawling, then walking. She has shown absolutely no interest in the stairs, except to use the bottom stair to help herself get upright. That is, until last week. As we were getting ready to sit down to a nice Sunday morning breakfast, she climbed. all. the. way. up. the. stairs!

Will and I immediately went into a slight panic. Other than the bedrooms/baths, there is not a "normal" doorway in our house. We have what you might refer to as an "open" floorplan, and the stairs are right in the middle of it. Now, please understand that I am not a big fan of all the gadgety baby stuff on the market. I have never owned a wipe warmer and I'm not a big fan of shopping cart covers either. Heck, I consider it a successful outing if all 5 of my kids get into the store and back out to the car without anyone "almost" getting hit by a car. I do not have time to decorate the shopping cart. But I digress. Upon realizing that Grace had acquired this new skill, we decided that two things were in order. A temporary barrier needed to be constructed immediately, and we were taking a trip to Babies r' Us right away.

All 7 of us got our shoes on, went potty and hit the road. 45 minutes later, we were ready to do some serious gate testing. We wandered through the store for a few minutes, Ooooing and Ahhhing at the abundance of cuteness along the way to the gate section. I was really hoping to have the chance to see their great assortment of gates, and have the opportunity to shop with a hands on approach. Call me crazy, but it seemed to me that if we were going to rely on the thing to keep our baby safe (and not inconvenience the rest of us too much), we needed to see more than just a picture. Well, I was in for some disappointment. Half of the gate section was gateless. They were SERIOUSLY low on stock. Fortunately, they did have this little gem. I almost forgot to mention that our staircase has lovely, natural wood railings, and as much as I love my kiddo, I was really hoping to avoid drilling big holes in them. So this gate, along with it's optional extensions (8" and 24"), looked like it just might work. Of course, Babies r' Us was not finished doling out the disappointment. They don't carry the extensions in the store, only online. Dang it! But then something occurred to me. Babies r' Us rarely has the best prices for anything. I decided to go home, put my internet searching skills to good use and fund us our gate.

Well, in light of the fact that life can get really busy sometimes and the incredible effectiveness of the temporary barrier constructed at the bottom of the stairs, I didn't get to my internet searching for a couple days. By Wednesday, I realized that we were all getting pretty tired of moving the carseat box or stepping over the large basket of baby toys to start or finish our trips up and down the stairs. It was time to get to searchin'. The first thing I found out was that I was SOOOOOO glad we had not purchased the gate at Babies r' Us. There were quite a few online retailers that had better prices. Secondly, these other retailers charged less for shipping and didn't charge sales tax for customers in California. Score! I also found out that we really needed to get out tails over to our staircase and figure out exactly how we wanted to lay out this gate. After a few different configurations, we figured out what would work best for us. We needed the gate, 1 24" section and 2 8" sections. Finally, I discovered that BabyAge.com had the best price, only charges $4.95 for shipping regardless of the size of your order and could get it here in a week. I have ordered from BabyAge before, and had good luck, so I went for it.







The gate arrived at our house this Tuesday evening. As it was a busy evening again, gate installation had to wait until Wednesday. Once Will got started though, the whole thing was done in about 30 minutes. This is THE COOLEST GATE I have ever seen! It hugs the contour of the staircase. It didn't require holes in the wood. All of the kids (even Justin), except Grace, can open and close it easily. It is VERY sturdy. The best part is that it isn't even all that ugly. 8^)




All right Gracie...bring on the next new skill!!!

PS For those of you with a different layout at your house, here are a couple more examples. ("borrowed" from the internet)







PPS After all that, I just realized that I never included the name of the great new find. This is the Kidco Configure Gate with the 24" and 8" extensions. It is model #G80.