How safe is your space?

Safety – often an afterthought until the unthinkable happens.  Hitting black ice with poor tyre treads or not noticing a gas leak because your smoke detector ran out of battery.  These are small maintenance fixes that could save your life one day.   Slater and Gordon Solicitors Birmingham note that many accidents can be avoided with some simple small fixes!

If your life circumstances have changed – eg a new pet or baby – you need to go through your entire home with a fine toothcomb and reassess how safe your home is.  Our 8 month old is starting to explore his surroundings and it won’t be long before he’s bumping into and getting into everything!

Here’s what we’ve learnt so far;

They can leap right out of your arms.  Any sharp corners of furniture needs bump proofed or replaced.  We switched from a long square coffee table with very hard edges to a long oval one.  Less hard corners!  Check other pieces of furniture for impact hazards.

Fireguards can still get hot!  Just because they protect from the main fire doesn’t mean they can be played with.  They stop little people getting too close but they can heat up themselves.  We’ve got a playpen for ours to keep them contained a bit and away from the fire in the winter.

Smoke detectors – get a stash of batteries and do a test every month, if it needs replaced you have stock to be able to do so.  You want to get your family out in an emergency and the quicker you know about any potentially fatal situations the better.

Peace of mind at night.  I find if I don’t lock the door at night (we live in a very rural area, it doesn’t always happen!)  I have bad lucid dreams early on in the night.  But then I weigh that up against the emergency services needing to get in to the property overnight if I’m alone with the baby and something happens to me.  It’s a trade off sometimes….!

Knowing what to do and who can help.  Making friends with the neighbours so we can knock on their door in an emergency, having the correct services listed in your phone and also knowing how to rely information to them. Having the household trained on basic first aid to be able to respond quickly if needed.  These are all things which worry me and it’s important for me to know what to do in an emergency as sometimes all sense and logic go out of the window!

Top Tips;

*Keep most things up high, shut away and just generally out of reach.  That goes for pets and babies!

*Plan out what you would do in an emergency, have all your numbers stored.

*Have some basic first aid training – understand the signs if all is not well.

That’s my #MySenseOfSafe!  Share yours below….