Childproofing our stove

Connor's been a bad boy. Well, a curious one anyways. Recently he's getting curious about the dials on our gas stove, and he's tall enough to reach them and twist them. The existing safety mechanism is a function where you press the knob in a tad before you twist it, but Connor's already able to defeat that by default, the way he reaches up for the dial presses it in already.

So I went online to check out what sort of babyproofing is available for stoves with the controls on the front. I'm surprised by the number of products that only prevent kids from reaching the range top, and not the front dials, happily displaying on their packaging how the kid is prevented from grabbing a pot, where they are totally ignoring the dials right next to their hands. Hmph.

I ended up picking up one of these from ToysRUs, with the intention of mounting it in front of the knobs, but there wasn't enough space to mount it in any spot.

It's probably better to just fence off the whole kitchen area. While I love the open concept kitchen we have, I'm always seeing more reasons why a kitchen cooking area should be a separate room unto itself.

It keep out:

• Curious troublemakers like kids and pets
• Backseat driver types who keep picking at your cooking techniques

It keeps in:

• oily smoke, fumes, and odours - especially when you fry fish.
• noise from the ventilation fans (plus I'm pretty sure an enclosed space makes the ventilation process a lot more efficient)
• excess heat from baking or making soup/stews

In the meantime, we've just detached all the knobs, but its a bit of a pain to have to plug them in each time we want to use the range.

edit - Its March 30th and the knobs are still all detached. We've figured out how to unlock and twist the posts to different positions, so we don't even put the knobs back on all the time. :D

Allen.