Teach Your Children: Childproofing (and Remembering the Childhood Experience)

My adorable cousin Lawson, who is a pirate (amongst other occupations).

Happy Saturday, everyone! Weekends are a time for laughing, creating and dreaming, and this post is all about that.

For all you folks with mini "Destroyer Units from Planet Entropia" - er, kiddos - out there, my extremely talented and hilarious uncle Dan Maginn (award-winning architect, father extraordinaire and principal at super rad KC-based architecture firm el dorado inc.) wrote a great piece on childproofing your home in this month's Dwell Magazine. Read. Laugh. And take note of the excellent tips on how to make your carefully curated home into a protected, disaster free zone (that's still incredibly hip). It's also a delightful read for those of us who have not yet been sent a Destroyer Unit to care for.

Check out el do's write up on the article here and savor every word of the article (with excellent illustration) here!

Dan reminds us that kids and adults experience the space we occupy in vastly different ways and that space is both transformative (just take one look at the Make-a-Wish foundation's heartbreakingly wonderful story of transforming San Francisco into Gotham City so BatKid could save the day) and experiential (think about how you felt watching BatKid go about his day -- did you see the photo of the father? I almost died -- v. how BatKid felt conquering evil and saving the
day). 

Dan's article reminded me of what it was like to be a kid and to be so dang excited (because I never would have used a word stronger than dang!) to explore my parents' house and its surroundings; to build forts and slide down stairs on pillows and put glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and climb around on (and sometimes get stuck in the rungs of)
bunk beds (when I was lucky enough to spend the night at a friend's house who had bunk beds)! 

My friend Lauren and I (both only children, and both children of parents whose homes were filled with antiques) "invented" a game called "Lava Monster" that involved needing to get from point A to point B without touching the ground (where, naturally, the hot, burning lava and the killer lava monster were), so anywhere
where we could get a foothold (precariously placed chair, antique table, unstable window sill) was fair game (inexplicably, we were always banished to the outdoors to finish the game out... and now I get why):

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Ah, childhood. And adulthood.

Enjoy Dan's article and enjoy your Saturday!

Happy Destroyer Unit Battling! :)
KK