Don't fence me in.

I hereby publicly confess and sincerely apologize for thinking (and most likely uttering) the following phrases over the course of the past five years:

"It's best not to use baby gates. They need to learn what they can and cannot touch."

"If our house is child-proof, they won't know how to respect things at other people's houses."

"If they touch it, we spank their hand. Every time. They realize pretty quickly that we mean business."

Uh, yeah.

Enter this guy:



After five months of cleaning up pools of dog water and slobbery half-eaten dogfood, kissing fat little fingers after a run-in with the dryer door, and finding him standing on the open dishwasher door holding a butter knife in each hand, I finally waved the white flag.

To make a short story long, there's a new sheriff in Griffintown... and it goes by the name of "SuperYard."

I not-so-secretly made fun of this monstrosity when Emily bought it for Evan in Maryland, but I couldn't dial her number fast enough when I had finally reached my limit with Davers. I detected a slight grin as she brought it over and helped me put it up. After all, she had offered it to me a half-dozen times after hearing me all exasperated on the phone, "Davis Jarrell! No no!" only to hear him repeat back to me, "No NO!"

Well, the official verdict is in on the SuperYard:

Yep. Three out of four of us love it.