What to do when baby is Houdini?

Here's an article from Darlene:

It started when I heard that my grand daughter was taking off her pj’s and diaper every morning just after she woke up – you know, in that fine window of opportunity before she decides to finally call out for mom or dad to get her breakfast? You can just imagine how much trouble a child can get into with time on their hands and no diaper on.

I googled to find out what every other parent who had to deal with this was saying. Google: “What do I do when my baby keeps taking off her diaper’. I didn’t even get past the “What do you do when my baby keeps taking…. And the rest was filled in by Google. This gave me the idea that this was a very common problem – even though every single person I asked if this happened to them with their children said ‘Nope”.

Duct tape their diaper some suggested. Put their sleepers on backwards. Buy a $200 video baby monitor so you can watch them like a hawk. Buy zip up sleepers or pj’s. The only part we didn’t try was putting her pj’s on backwards. The neckline is so high in the back compared to the front on the average toddler’s pyjamas that we could envision her choking on her sleepers. No way! There were a lot of suggestions to use the good old “Safety’ safety pin that we used back in my day (the late 1970’s) to hold the zip up pj’s in place (of course it takes little Houdini one second to figure out how to unsnap the little piece of material that they have to baby-proof the zipper on front zip pj’s). These were an extra large stainless steel safety pin with a hard plastic sleeve on the end that you snapped down over the closed pin thereby inhibiting the opening of the pin. We used those to pin cloth diapers onto our kids (no - Pampers did exist but you needed to be able to afford them back then), or to pin their soother to their shirt – there was a myriad of ways to put them to use. But when that was suggested to my daughter, I think everyone involved got the idea that if little Houdini could get out of a duct taped diaper then she could also figure out the mere schematics of a “Safety” safety pin and after getting it open would then carve a hole in the stomach of her teddy bear, scratch “Olivia was here’ into the wall beside the crib, give herself a tattoo, poke her eye out – and then use it to crawl down out of her crib like Lara Croft - every mother’s nightmare!

So much for the safety pin. But I digress – she figured out that the little flap with the two measly snaps covering the top of her zipper popped off in seconds and down came the zipper and off came the pj’s etc. "This is so much fun. What will my parents try next. I am not going to wake them up for two hours now because I cant wait to see what I can play with next."

So I did what any concerned grandma would do. I wrote an ad on kijiji and to all my friends in my contact list that have kids. I asked "What do I do when my baby keeps taking of her diaper”. I had an enormous response. Duct tape, pj’s on backwards, video cam baby monitors, zip up sleepers but nothing I hadn’t already read on the internet or tried. So in the meantime I took all of her snap button sleepers and sewed them shut by hand – just leaving enough unstitched to slide her in and out of the pj’s (so up to the top two buttons). Very inconvenient to put on and off but she was trapped!

Then I received an email from a lovely lady in Calgary via Kijiji who wrote “Try Escapeeejays. You would probably have to call their 800 number to ship to Canada... hope this helps!" She also told me to try to put her pj's on backwards (apparently works better in a size larger that she would normally wear) or using a baby safety pin to attach the end of the zipper to the jammies themselves. I started to laugh so hard about the other ideas but that website sure looked promising.

Well it was. A stroke of genius! I purchased four pairs of their back zip escapeejays and they arrived yesterday. They come in a variety of sizes and beautiful colors, they are extremely well made, I had them delivered to me within a week and…. they work!!! If you have this problem – please check the website out and buy them. We went through the diaper problem for over two months with no end in sight and now we can relax knowing that when my daughter and her hubby get up to get the baby she will still have her jammies and diaper on.