The Baby Gate

Melissa and Stephanie stop by to say hi to Baby Audrey (and us, too!)

Most people buy baby gates to protect their little ones from danger (stairs) or to keep them out of certain areas (the kitchen when mom's cooking). Fortunately our apartment is set up in such a way that we don't need a baby gate. The kitchen and living room are one in the same, the doors on the other rooms don't need to be kept open and there's no staircase. So even though our living space doesn't necessitate a baby gate, our living situation does.

Last semester, before Audrey could crawl, we left our door open much of the time. Unless we wanted some quiet and didn't particularly want people dropping in, the door was open. The students stopped by fairly frequently and some days we had a steady stream of them. While this isn't for everyone, it is for Ryan and I. We loved seeing people at all hours of the day and making our home available to them. University students (and I was definitely one of them) miss the normality of a home life. That's something we provide at the LLC and we loved sharing it.

Then Audrey learned to crawl. We kept the door closed to keep her from escaping onto the landing just out side our door with stairs going both up and down. When the new batch of students arrived we tried to have our door open but it was limited to when Audrey slept and generally by that time the students had buckled down to work and Ryan and I were ready to watch a movie or read. Thus connecting with the students became more of a challenge. We didn't realize what a difference one closed door makes and it took us a bit to figure out how much it did effect our relationships. We knew it was part of the problem but we also ran through a gambit of other possibilities: Am I not putting in enough effort? Is it just personality differences? Do they not like me? So we put in more effort and found they do like us and personalities do match up. That left the closed door as the culprit. So on Saturday while shopping with Christie I got a baby gate. I hadn't discussed for-sure getting one with Ryan before my outing so I didn't know how he would react. As soon as I was in the door he said, 'You got a gate! Great!" and took it out of my hand and started setting it up. I was home for five minutes until I headed out again and in that time a student came by. The next day we had three stay around for conversations and several more say hello to Audrey as she peered out at them. The trend has continued over the last several days and what a difference it makes.

Even though we're not having life-changing talks, much less talking with every student, just having the students pop their heads in to ask what I'm cooking or make faces with Audrey makes all the difference. It makes it easier to ask about their day and hear how they're doing. They know we're here for them and we know they're here for us. It's my favourite part of living in community: living life open. We only have to keep the doors (figurative and literal) open.