You can try to make people safe. But, if they are determined, they will manage to hurt themselves.

That’s the important thing to remember when you see someone cutting toward himself, or mowing the lawn wearing sandals, or checking under the hood of a running car while wearing a tie.

Several nights ago, I heard a thump and then the sound of little feet running. I thought rather blandly in my sleep, “Racoon?” Then the door opened and my soon to be 2-year-old came in and climbed up onto the bed. She had figured out how to climb out of her crib.

That would be the equivalent of me scaling a 5-foot wall with no foothold. Yes, I can do that, but I’m an adult.

Anyway, she didn’t get hurt. And, the next day, within a minute of waking up from her nap, I went in to see her perched on top of the crib.

That was the end of that.

Now, some of you may know that I made the crib and detailed the design and build here. It took quite a bit of time to get all the dimensions right for it to be considered objectively safe. That is, safe according to proper regulations set out by whatever body governs how best to keep babies safe while locked up in a crib. A crib is, after all, a baby prison. And, like any prison, if the inmate is sufficiently cunning, he or she will find a way out.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time on this particular thing and part of what I spent time on was wondering how I would adapt the thing to become a bed. So, I knew how to handle this current situation. Break out the saw.

Some of you may think, ah, but this is a perfect excuse to make a bed from scratch and set the crib aside as a handmade piece to be passed on to whichever one of my kids ends up with a baby first. Yeah, that’s a nice idea. There is one stumbling block, though. I did not make the crib capable of being completely taken apart and it is, in fact, wider than the door. It was assembled in the room and was never meant to leave.

Certainly that’s a poor way to design something. Design a piece of furniture that can only be in a room for a couple of years and make it so it will need to be broken apart to leave the room. Well, I don’t think it’s a bad design.

A bad design was exhibited in a crib I owned around twenty years ago for my oldest son. It clipped together and had sliding plastic locks that held everything in place. The sliding plastic locks were attached to the wooden rails with short screws. They, of course, slipped into other plastic parts. The idea is the crib was completely collapsible, so it could be stored when you finish with it.

Well, no, it was designed that way to take up the least amount of space for transport and warehouse storage.

Anyway, it was perfectly safe at the time. It would currently be condemned because the mechanism for lowering the side was too simple. I condemn it from here, however, because an 18-month old standing in it, holding onto the top rail and pulling at it while bouncing up and down, could cause the screws in the plastic clips to pop out of the wood and let the side fall completely off.

I didn’t screw those things on. They came that way. Plastic attached that way will have some lateral play when sufficient force is exerted. And, wiggle it back and forth enough, it allows the screw to be levered out. The screws had to be short because they screwed into a thin piece of wood. After that popped off, the bottom mattress support clipped into the end of the crib was all that was preventing it from falling apart like a house of cards.

I’d rather smash up the crib myself than have it fall apart due to the unbridled energy of a toddler.

Details on what exactly I did to change the crib will be added to the article within a few days.