Product Review

The most useless childproofing item we've purchased?

These corner protectors:

You put them on the sharp corners of furniture to prevent the baby from smacking his little head open when he falls on things.

Except they're stuck on with flimsy double-sided tape. Lumpyhead goes around the house pulling them all off like it's his job. He refuses to bow to the tyranny of the corner protectors. Can you see the little face in the lower left-hand corner of the picture? Lumpyhead's moving in on the corner protector, and is about to give it a yank.

After he gnaws on them for awhile, Lumpyhead deposits the corner protectors wherever it's convenient. Sometimes we find them in our shoes, halfway down the hall, or in some random box.

Because of the aforementioned flimsy double-sided tape, he can pull them off without much effort. Bump and I keep putting them back on the furniture, coaxing the progressively less and less sticky (weak-ass to begin with) tape to hang on. We should just give up, but for some reason we feel compelled to reaffix them just as Lumpyhead is compelled to pull them the hell off.

See?

Oh, and that little green ball? Goes with him everywhere. You can hear him crawling on hard surfaces with a "slap, slide, clop, slide; slap, slide, clop, slide" as his bare hand, knee, ball hand, then other knee moves across the floor. It's like he's a quadruped with a peg leg.

It's a good thing, actually. It means he tends to do things with his left hand, as his right hand is always clutching the green ball. Bump wants him to be a lefty pitcher, and this is one way to get Lumpyhead proficient with his left. It seems more humane than tying his right arm to his side, anyway.