Adult-Proofing Your Home

For Easter, I decided to hide 24 beer around the house and wake my significant other and tell him to go find them. He was less than impressed at first to be presented with an empty beer box, but after I explained what was going on a third time (he was still groggy after all, and when I’m excited my words run in one long string), he got into it.

We found most of them (how do you forget where you put something in ten minutes?), but there were two missing cans that we weren’t too worried about. After we go the one out of the microwave none of the rest posed much of a threat. Besides what’s better than sitting down to find a beer in the couch cushions, sure it’s warm, but sometimes you’re desperate (I figure it beats the one couch in a house I once lived in, which, when lifted, produced four pairs of red sunglasses, 100 beer caps, 13 dollars in change, and a plastic dinosaur. None of this was too surprising as our other couch was called the coffin and had cup-holders cut into the arms, but I digress).

All of this made me realize—and given that our stairs don’t have a railing, the floor just ends in the pool room and you fall down the stairs when trying to line up that perfect shot—that our house is basically booby trapped.

It’s not as bad as some of the places I’ve lived, say the apartment I was renting in Bratislava where I tried to change my sheets and got electrocuted from a gaping, broken electrical socket hidden by the bed, but it’s pretty interesting at times.

We keep a Nerf gun upstairs for what I call, “conflict resolution” and the refrigerator door just sort of explodes every few months, the shelves in it collapsing suddenly, and shoots tiny bottles of hot sauce at you. Now that I’m at the age where friends are coming over with dogs and children (and how to explain to your favorite mother of two that her youngest just got a hold of a bottle of malt liquor by accident and is now drunk and punching spare tires in the garage?), I am considering that you have to sign a waiver upon entry.

I can assure you that anything that happens in our house that ends badly was probably an accident. But this is what happens when you don’t have to spend your days installing baby gates and covering the electrical sockets. You might just forget to clean up the slip and slide that you built in the kitchen.