Meet the Baby-Proofer

There’s a fair amount of sense and sensibility among parents and grandparents when it comes to safeguarding their home for a baby.

For everything else, there’s Howard Appelbaum, baby-proofer.

“See this?” asks Appelbaum. He is on his hands and knees — baby level — in the apartment of a Manhattan couple who have an eight-month-old daughter. He has just pulled a small, decorative plastic cap off one of the wheels of their stroller.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” Appelbaum says to the mother. “I’m just trying to make you aware of things. Don’t take this personally.”

Appelbaum, 52, is straight-forward and no no-nosense. If there’s a lack of humor about him, well, maybe it’s because there’s nothing funny about a baby being able to reach a stray rubber band or paper clip or a plastic covering on a stroller wheel that can end up in his mouth and become a choking hazard, nor is there any hilarity in a baby being able to reach a hot cup of coffee.

“I am the plugger of loopholes,” Appelbaum says, and that holds true for grandparents’ homes as well. Although grandparents make up only a small amount of Appelbaum’s thriving business, he says he baby-proofs 15 to 25 grandparents’ homes a year.

“What we found is, pills are the No. 1 hazard,” he says. “I know a woman who had a heart pill and a child got to half of it. It was in a shag carpet.”

Also: loose change. Appelbaum says coins are the biggest choking hazard for children.

Appelbaum believes in a concept he calls the "15-second umbrella."

“There is a 15-second time period that a child will be out of the grasp of adults,” he says. “Kids only get faster, we only get slower. You assume that the baby is going to sit there, and you turn your head to answer a phone and you turn back, and the baby is not there and is actually 10 feet away. You have to think, react, and move, and within that time period, that’s a 15-second umbrella.”

But he also cautions parents and grandparents not to turn their home into a jail cell. For instance, Appelbaum says baby gates should be used as a control, not as a deterrent, recommending that the gates be put at the top and bottom of staircases, and at the door to their room to keep them in at night when they begin to walk.

“We don’t recommend the house to be a prison,” he says. “It is the baby’s home, the parents’ home, it is sharing. Explain the word ‘no’ when it’s of substance, not because they’re going to get fingerprints on something.”

Other tips: Pull on the eyes, ears, and tags of stuffed animals; remove baby bumpers from the crib when the baby starts to stand so he or she can’t use them for leverage in climbing out of the crib; watch for loose staples in magazines; keep the baby-monitor wire away from the crib; and keep windows low, using a typical 12-ounce soda can as a guide. If that 4 1/2-inch soda can fit through the window opening, so can a baby.