DS is 10 months and a force of nature. He's not walking yet but crawling and climbing on everything. Our downstairs is open plan and hard floors - the kitchen bit is OK but the dining table, sofa, TV unit are all potential dangers and there's only so much distracting I can do before he realises! He's too little to reliably understand "no" - and to be fair the place probably looks like a baby theme park from his height! I'd be saying no all day which kind of undermines it! At the moment whenever I'm cooking/ cleaning/ going to the loo he has to sit in his travel cot or high chair and it's full on death avoidance the rest of the time!
Right now a playpen would be a godsend but they're really pricey and don't seem to come up often on FB marketplace around here. I don't want to spend the money if I'm only going to use it for a few weeks.
Those of you with older kids - is this a short phase I should just get through or do you think it's something that will be useful for a long time and worth the investment?