Maybe it’s because we live in a house with a lot of stairs, railings and other places from which children can fall, I’m a big fan of “baby gates”. I’ve written about fireplace gates and have a variety around the house. But often the gates you tend to see at your local store just don’t seem to fit in the types of doorways we tend to have in modern houses.

So, I was excited to see this Wide Spaces Swing Gate, available from Evenflo. It expands from 42” to a big 5 feet for those really wide doorways. You can even buy add on panels for…well, I don’t know…really, really wide spaces.

Anyone who has carried a baby while coaxing a toddler down the stairs knows that a one-handed gate is optimal. This one closes easily with just a quick shove and swings wide to allow easy passage of adults, kids, dogs and other sundry family members.

The mounting hardware is low key so it prevents huge holes on doorframes and can easily be removed when not in use. And, it’s moderately attractive so your home doesn’t end up looking like a prison for little ones. Though, of course the gate is childproof so prison may not be so bad a choice of words…NOT!

Decorations?

Check.

Costumes?

Check.

Crafts? Ummm. Since I decided a few years ago that continuing to buy lots of interesting, electronic and plastic decorations for… each holiday… every year was a wee bit wasteful, we’ve been into crafts. Rather than buy and discard, we make one or two crafts each year to add to our growing stash of home décor. Admittedly, our home will not soon be featured in a major decorating magazine with our limited repertoire, but over the years our stash will grow and we will remember, not where we bought each piece, but when we made them

Since our skill levels, both mine and my child’s are not, shall we say, well developed, we try to stick to simple crafts. These Halloween suncatchers are easy to make,  and work well in just about any home, provided you don’t live in a cave. I’m looking forward to scattering these across the house, much to the annoyance of DH, of course.

These Halloween placemats are another good choice. We love placemats around our house, especially ones that last. Rather than purchase holiday-decorated paper cups and plates that will be pitched each year, we choose to decorate with reusable items that we pack away and take out again and again. Since these are also homemade, they meet both of my priorities!

Boo!

In our peripatetic society, we move, I’ve been told, on average every 5 to 7 years. Though this number may increase or decrease over the next few years, depending on your place in the current housing bubble crisis, it’s almost certain you will not spend all of your children’s formative years in one house.

This of course has led to the demise of the charming habit of tracking children’s heights in pencil on the wall of one’s home. Lacking the tools and often the will to carefully cut out the sentiment laid piece of plaster on which you’ve marked your children’s growth, most of us have started to consider a paper or plastic growth chart instead.

This Alex Toys Watch Me Grow - On My Road Growth chart is 42” tall which will easily cover your child’s first years and features 4 photo pockets. Since I’m always looking for new ways to display photos of my son, this seems like an easy way to take a trip down memory lane.

Easy to hang up on just about any wall and carefully remove and pack in one of the stack of boxes accompanying every move, growth carts are the new “wall”.