Child-proofing is simply impossible

“It’s not as if the queen is visiting,” I said to my wife.

That was undeniably true. The queen of England isn’t known for domestic mayhem.

Then again, the queen of England isn’t two and a half years old. Our youngest grandchild is.

And kids of that age tend to like to grab things and rearrange things and move things and unintentionally break things and throw things that shouldn’t be thrown and drop things and do things that make grandparents shudder.

So it was that on the Saturday before the Fourth of July, Connie and I were trying to “kid-proof” the house. (There is no such thing as kid-proofing; it’s only an unreachable target to be strived for. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never get there.)

We’d already made sure that sharp objects were out of reach, but there were so, so many other things that little hands could grab onto.

Some of that is our fault.

We have, both of us will confess, too doggoned many tchotchkes.

Don’t know that word? It’s probably the most misspelled ever. I had to rely on Google to double-check.

It’s a Yiddish term for what we’re more likely to call “knick knacks” or “stuff.”

And we are a tchotchke goldmine.

I started in the living room, scooping up items and moving them to higher ground.

What did I scoop? A palm-sized jade Buddha I bought in Myanmar, small portraits of both my grandmothers, a couple of not very valuable antique pocket watches, a slightly broken locket with a photo of my mother when she was a child, a tin tea cup that I acquired in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for $3, a 19th century photo of my grandfather Haynes and more.

Then it was on to the family room for more of the same: A collection of wooden sculptures of birds and a couple of porcelain models of other species, a terracotta head of an elephant that I bought from a street vendor in Afghanistan for $10 and a lovely lacewood box by Jay County woodworker Carol Johnston.

None of this was particularly valuable, but all of it carried with it great sentimental and emotional attachment. And at our age, that is the currency that counts.

By the time the queen and her entourage arrived, I thought we were in pretty good shape.

That is until the two and a half year old swept into the house.

I followed in her wake.

Like a heat-seeking missile, she zeroed in on all the stuff I had forgotten or overlooked.

First were the pinecones.

For reasons I cannot begin to explain, we’ve had an old wooden bowl of pinecones under a table in our living room. Maybe they were originally a Christmas decoration. Who knows?

Bea zipped toward them immediately and grabbed a pinecone, holding it up victoriously as if to let me know that all of my efforts had been in vain.

Before I could talk her out of it, she headed upstairs. I followed, because what else is grandpa supposed to do.

Nothing there caught her attention, and by the time we were back downstairs I had retrieved the pinecone.

Victory, I thought.

Then she found the rocks.

In another wooden bowl, this one by the fireplace, she found a small collection of Native American stone tools, grinding rocks and the like.

How I had overlooked it, I did not know. But Bea didn’t overlook it.

And now she had a good-sized rock about the size of a softball in her hand and looked as if she wanted to make a play at first base.

Fortunately, her dad intervened with both that rock and the next one.

And that was it. Having tested the limits, having demonstrated she could find all the flaws in my defense system, Bea relented.

After all, she’d made her point.

Both she knew and I knew that I was defenseless.