On a recent rainy Friday, Alyzza Oser was waiting for the babyproofer to arrive at her spacious duplex apartment on West 54th Street. Samantha, her pretty 9-month-old daughter, who has active little hands and a raging curiosity, was sitting in the living room, playing with her mother’s briefcase. “Samantha,” Oser said, “that isn’t a toy. How about a stuffed kangaroo instead?”
A kangaroo was fine by Samantha, who seemed up to playing with anything. And boy, did she have lots of options. Oser and her husband, Ira, had just moved their offices into their home, and were getting ready to move to Westchester County, N.Y..
The apartment was an extravagant field of diversions. There were stairs waiting to be fallen down; cross-country skis and glass shelves, and a halogen lamp, all just begging to be toppled over; the cat’s litter box ripe for digging; pointy things ready for their sharpness tests. And best of all, every single thing in the apartment was edible.
“There are things I know shouldn’t be in here,” Alyzza Oser said with a helplessness shared by first-time parents who are told their homes are four-walled booby traps. Even as home accident rates for children are falling in America, many parents remain in a quandry about how many precautions to take — and at what price.
Had she followed the advice of brochures and child-rearing magazines, she would have toured her home on her hands and knees for a child’s-eye view. Oser (who flung herself off balance beams as a child gymnast) didn’t want to succumb to paranoia. Still, she wanted to do something, even if it was just installing guards at the spiral staircase. “I don’t think there is such a thing as total babyproofing,” she said.
She would only have to open one of many mail-order catalogues for a dizzying carousel of options: anti-bacterial highchairs to zap E. coli, salmonella and other germs; heat-sensitive spoons that turn white when food is too hot; diaper-changing tables with seatbelts; shock-absorbers for coffee-table edges; safety holders for hair-curling irons and nets that seal children into their cribs — everything short of bubble-wrap overalls from Baby Gap.
To negotiate this potential minefield, Oser turned to a babyproofer — someone with a little expertise and a lot of common sense. Help arrived in the form of Frank Wright, a man in a flannel shirt and with such a comforting demeanor that he reminded her of her father.
Wright, 52, started Child Proofers in 1992 after he was laid off as a banking executive. He’s one of two babyproofers who advertise in the Big Apple Parents’ Paper. Most toy and baby-equipment stores have sections with child safety equipment, but babyproofers like Wright make house calls. His motto? “When they start to crawl, it’s time to call.”
“Tell me what concerns you most,” he asked Ms. Oser.
She handed Samantha to Dorothy Davenport, her nanny, and led Wright to the spiral stairs. He recommended plexiglass guards, top and bottom, but nothing more elaborate, although he could have. (He once did a stair job in Greenwich, Conn., that cost $8,500.)
But the stairs were just the beginning. He made warning noises about a tall houseplant, even though it wasn’t the dreaded poisonous ficus. “Dirt isn’t recommended for growing children,” Wright said.
Nor were the contents of the cat’s litter box under the stairs, for which he recommended a three-foot-tall plexiglass barricade (the cat quickly gets used to jumping, he said).
The contents of a bedside table in the master bedroom were similarly suspect, so he suggested latches. Oser agreed, but rejected latches for the dresser drawers.
The crib slats in the nursery were close enough together to pass muster, but since the room also serves as an office, there were more hazards. Wright didn’t push for casing for the computer wires, though he suggested taping them to the floor or putting them out of reach. But he did persuade Oser to put covers on the electrical outlets.
For Oser’s concern about little fingers getting smashed in the doors, he recommended a wedge from the hardware store, nothing more. In the bathrooms he recommended that she buy a spigot cover to prevent head banging, a scald guard and a shower caddy to keep delicious-looking shampoo out of reach. He also made a successful case for installing a latch on the toilet. “Kids love water,” is all he had to say.
No stove knob covers, cooktop fences, oven latches or even a microwave radiation leak detector seemed necessary for the closet-size kitchen, though he did make a case for moving the cat’s food dish off the floor and latching the lower cabinets. A refrigerator latch was also a possibility.
Oser looked overwhelmed. “This apartment never looked so big before,” she said.
But keeping things latched, Wright cheerfully explained, would give her peace of mind. “And it eliminates your having to say no all the time,” he said.
In the chamber of horrors commonly known as the living room, he suggested a few more latches for the cabinets (“China plates don’t bounce,” he said). Oser was worried that Samantha might have a smashing encounter with the glass door on the stereo cabinet, so Wright suggested a lock. The back garden also needed stair guards and barriers around the shubbery to prevent impromptu foraging expeditions.
Finally, it was time for the written estimate: $400, including installation.
