You may have seen a few weeks ago some awful pictures of Erin. You see, she took a bit of a tumble and hit her head on our very hard, stone fireplace. She ended up with a pretty big hole in her forehead, blood everywhere and a very panicked and scared Mummy!
I stupidly didn’t really research enough about safety options for this when it came to toddler proofing the house. I think I pretty much covered everything else with safety locks and having furniture attached to the wall etc. but I didn’t sort out the fireplace. Obviously we have now experienced just how bad injuries can be to the head and the body if the edges are not properly covered. As bad as Erin’s head injury is, if we’d had the fire lit it could have been much worse! Burns caused by an unsafe fireplace could be lethal so this is definitely something to keep in mind when toddler proofing your house!
I feel awful as this could have been avoided.
Like any other time when I have a question or query, I took to Facebook to ask other bloggers if they could recommend some safety products for fireplaces. Everyone was super helpful and came up with loads of ideas!
As our fireplace is raised, we are not able to use one of those big, metal fireguards. Instead, we opted for the ClevaMama Fireplace Edge Guard. For £16.99 I got 5 straight pieces and 2 corners of soft beige foam. Each piece attaches by double sided tape which you put on the underneath of the foam yourself. This then just presses down onto the surface and attaches by the tape.
Our fireplace is really old and doesn’t have a proper straight edge so the straight pieces didn’t attach as well as they could have done. The 5 pieces are a bit jaggedy and this annoys me but there’s no other way I could have attached them. Although they are not straight, each piece if firmly attached to the stone and Erin hasn’t managed to get them off… yet!
Honestly, it’s ugly as hell. My fireplace looks awful. I think the pictures make it look better than it actually is. However, if this keeps my little girl’s head safe from any more scares, I don’t care.
The whole point of this post is to raise awareness about fireplace safety. I wasn’t as clued up as I should have been and I would hate for this to happen to another child. Please do share this post if you can to make more people aware of what could happen!
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