Going Mobile

My 13-month-old son crawled today! Finally!
He has been making attempts at crawling for the past month. He finally got everything working together. This means we have to re-baby-proof the house. So, my wife dug out the gate for the stairs.
Stair gates are both a blessing and a curse. The obvious blessing is that they keep the kids from tumbling down the stairs. The curse is the fact that it becomes inconvenient to go up and down the stairs. You find yourself doing strange things to keep from having to use the stairs. For example, the TV is downstairs. This means that I will likely go days without watching TV just to avoid going downstairs. For some reason, my wife doesn't think that this is just cause to spend money on a flat screen HDTV for the upstairs.
We must also move books, magazines, and other odds and ends high enough off the floor so that they are out of reach. We find that we quickly run out of shelf space.
The biggest concern comes from the small particles of food and other items that often end up on the floor and go unnoticed. Stray cheerios are not so big an issue. Aside from the disgust factor of eating something that has lain in a shadowy crevice for 3 days, not much legitimate harm can come from them. The bigger concerns are in the form of forgotten play-doh peices, shards of plastic wrapping, and the rare- but highly interesting- toenail clipping. These, and similar dangerous nuisances, are a bane to the parents of a mobile child.
So, if you read a blog in the next few weeks that seems disjointed and possibly unfinished, be sure that I have had to drop my train of thought to do immediate intervention for my son.