I had five children in just under three and a half years. I had to improvise on some things.
Thankfully, my kids have all been healthy. Their gross motor skills developed early. Translated, that means as toddlers they were (are still) runners, climbers and jumpers.

Isn’t she cute? I don’t think my girls ever went inside.

Once somebody gave me one of those big plastic houses kids are supposed to play house in. I had space inside so I put in it the family room. Not once did my girls play house in it. No, no. They did, however, stand on top of it and jump off, repeatedly. Had to get rid of it. That cute little house was a safety hazard for my twins, two of whom I call Thelma and Louise . . . but I digress.

We had a long informal dining table, also given to us. With the leaves attached it sat eight people. It was just the size we needed. However, according to my Olympic monkey children it was also long enough to run across. Again, a safety hazard. The table wasn’t that long and once the toddler runs and reaches the end? BAM! No, this was not going to work. I’d caught the kids right before falls on previous table running attempts but sooner or later my luck would run out. My daily goal back then was just to stay out of the Emergency Room (and off the Six O’clock news).

Still, I needed a table, so it could not suffer the fate of the play house. The table and the children must learn to co-exist safely. But the children were still little, they were at that age where I could really only chase behind them. They had no concept of consequences, danger, or any real responsiveness to my voice — they were all,

“Oh I can run, I can climb. Therefore, I will run and I will climb — all the time.”

And all my parental, “No, Stop! Wait!!” and all that jazz — meant nothing.

Absolutely, nothing. Say it again, y’all . . .

Back to the problem. How to keep the girls off the table? (Later it’ll be how to keep them off the pole, but I digress again.) They could only get on the table by first climbing on the chairs, but simply moving the chairs away from the table had not worked. These minions simply pushed them back to the table and climbed up, then a sibling would follow and in a blink of an eye, I had a line-up of miniature Village People looking toddlers on a table.

No, no. I needed something more secure.

I think it started with a jump rope. No, I didn’t tie the children up (not then, heh heh heh).

But after every meal, I would push the chairs in, grab a rope, thread it through the chairs around the table and tie them up in a nice knot.

The children’s fine motor skills had not developed enough to untie the rope. They weren’t (yet) strong enough to pull the tied chairs away, though they tried.

Success.

I didn’t realize how weird it was until a friend from out-of-town came to visit. We sat at the table together, ate, fed the kids. When we were finished I cleared the table, got out the rope and proceeded to tie the chairs around the table while we were chatting away.

She stopped talking and said, carefully, slowly, like talking to a crazy person:

“What are you . . . doing?’

Oh snap, sometimes you don’t know how strange and dysfunctional you are until there is someone to see it.

Me: “You mean you don’t tie your chairs together after every meal?”

Just Me With . . . a rope after every meal.

Sometimes the kids did listen to me, even when I didn’t want them to. See, “Momma said, No!“