Ryan's Irritating Innovations

My second-born has never been a sit-and-observe-the-world kind of person. Rather, he opts to utilize anything he can get his overly-capable hands on to gain access to higher, and much more life-threatening surfaces. He's discovered that dining room chairs move swiftly across laminate flooring and allow him to peruse the medicine cabinet. An upside-down pot facilitates the grabbing of the knife block. Those door-knob covers designed to keep babies out of rooms are a minor speed bump in sneaking out to the garage, climbing into the driver's seat of the van, opening the garage door and fumbling to put the keys in the ignition. His favorite past-time is chasing Chloe through the house with a "whacker" and making her scream... we do this at least 10 times before lunch. Yesterday I found him sucking with all his might on a straw that he'd inserted into the honey... something that I still am phobic about giving him due to the threat of botulism (per The American Academy of Pediatrics).
I'm not a hundred percent sure what "the vapors" are but I'm assuming that my son gives them to me... he breaks something of value every day, antagonizes the dog until she nips him, runs through the house with knives, uses the dishwasher door as a trampoline-- dare I ask what tomorrow (or the teenage years) will bring? GULP.


Measures taken:


Observe: an example of how my son comes by his ways naturally... Mike uses old, annoyingly useless toy parts to fabricate a "lock" for the medicine cabinet. Similarly, our fridge proudly displays a dog-collar-like bracelet to discourage the help-yourself-to-the-chocolate-syrup game that my son has invented.














And, here you see a puzzle of inter-mingled chairs designed to thwart the little guy... he just climbs it like a billy goat, though. Thus creating one more potential disaster.

Yikes, guys. YIKES.