The big news of the day is the gate at the head of the stairs on the deck:
Not shown, but there is an identical set of stairs on the far side of the deck, with an identical gate.
The gates were my wife’s idea. She envisioned letting our 3-year-old and 18-month-old play on the deck, semi-supervised (from inside). I opposed the gates on the grounds that they would be ineffective and would cause more problems than they solved. Like a firewall, they give you a false sense of security.
Case in point: we have metal gates at the head and foot of the stairs inside the house, and the 3-year-old has been able to open those gates since he was 2. I see no reason why a motivated 3-year-old would not be able to open these new gates as well. Or hurt himself trying. In fact, the worst accident we’ve ever had on the inside stairs was when I slipped while carrying my younger son. We slid down the stairs and rammed into the bottom gate, bruising my knee and warping the gate. (The kid, mirabile dictu, came out unscathed.)
I argued my viewpoint as best I could, and I lost. Our contractor installed the gates this afternoon. My wife picked up the kids from daycare. While she was outside admiring the new gates, the 3-year-old slipped out the garage and ran over to our neighbor’s house.
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Obviously, your neighbor needs to install gates as well.
— epc 
I envision both a bylaw in your town requiring gates, and a competing collection of working groups devising new “Gate Standards” that will ensure the safest gates, and then implementing these GSS’s (Gate Standard Situations) in varying version numbers over time.
All of them will have that cute little round ball on top of the post.
What you need is a Linus firewall for your firewall. Try adding a line-of-sight light-beam gate with bell to the gate and garage as backup. You might you get sick of the announcements everytime someone enters though. So put an RFID in the 3 year old and filter for the signature or some other trait specific to little people. :) Like two beams at different heights, if both are triggered it’s a tall person, so don’t set the alarm off. (Just hope they don’t learn to be tall and add extra sensors if they like to crawl)
And remember to add a fail-safe for the fail-safe.
Wow. Recently I also had the unpleasant experience of slipping down our inside stairs while carrying my daughter. She was amazingly not injured too (unlike her dad), and yes, we also installed a gate.
I thought I was like the luckiest guy in the world at the time, but perhaps there is a Law of Nature that says “kids don’t get hurt when being carried by their parents”, or something. You know, like the one that says that cats always land on their feet…
Kids are amazingly resilient to that sort of thing. Adults are too breakable. Kids can handle bouncy castles, for example. Adults cannot.
— Ithika
The gates are one thing. But I think the speed limit sign is totally over the top.
@Patrick: heh. I agree.
— Ryan
That’s the little known corrollary about never underestimating the ingenuity of fools; c.f. 3 year old children.
When she was 4 or 5 years old, my baby sister fell from the top of our back (concrete!) stairs, at least twice as high up as those, into a tiny garden patch. Mom took her to the emergency room, but she wasn’t even so much as bruised.
I, on the other hand, had broken a tooth (jumping off the sofa!) and nearly cut off a finger (something with a saw in the garage) by the time I was three.
And yet somehow here I am anyway, the tooth long gone and the scar on my finger barely visible…conversely, a tumble from my bike two & 1/2 years ago still causes me occasional pain and makes fun popping noises. As Ithika notes, kids are generally quite resilient, especially in comparison to us “old” folk.
— Elaine
You haven’t mentioned whether you’re sleeping on the couch for your very public “I told you so.”
— W^L+
The deck that Atom built!
— Nat
“My wife picked up the kids from daycare. While she was outside admiring the new gates, the 3-year-old slipped out the garage and ran over to our neighbor’s house.”
Did your wife eventually blame you for the ineffective gates? Hehe…
— Jane E.
The gate may serve as more of a psychological barrier than a physical one. Simply drill it into them that they can’t go past that point without permission. Most playgrounds aren’t completely fenced, but the children still know the boundaries. On the other hand, at least it’s good for keeping your dog on the deck.
— Craig
The worst 48 hours of my life happened after my then-one-year-old went thump-thump-thump (like Winnie-the-Pooh being dragged by Christopher Robin) down a flight of wooden stairs to a linoleum floor below, which happened because I didn’t notice that my then-three-year-old had opened the gate at the top of the stairs. The hospital finally concluded that he didn’t have a hematoma after all–nothing more than a hairline fracture–and discharged him.
To keep our now-almost-three-year-old from wandering out of our yard, we have installed a pool-gate alarm; if you open the gate (or leave it open for fifteen seconds) without pushing The Button That Small Children Neither Reach Nor Comprehend The Significance Of, it lets out a 110dB shriek.
Perhaps rubberizing the steps and platform would help to soften the impact of any potential accidental falls. I’ve never thought much of wood as a material for gates and stuff..
— Maki
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