Using Home Assistant, adguard home and an $8 smart outlet to avoid brain rot

This, for me, is the most interesting part of your comment:

> our toddler would unlock and open the front door, go outside (at night!), take pictures of the house, go back in, close and lock the door, and go back into his bed.

Did you ever ask your toddler why they did this? The thought process, for a toddler, to do that, to want a photo of the outside of the house at night enough to do that. That's some high level curiosity, worth fostering.

One of mine at that age would have had that level of quirkiness, but probably would have been too scared of "the dark" (also, our house already had a security system installed when we bought it, which we still set off accidentally every now and then, so the kids would probably have known that as well).

Result might not be as expected ;-)

A much younger cousin used to do that — sans the camera or photo taking part in my village. He could barely talk. When asked around that time and a bit later as well, because it continued, he said something that spooked some in the family. He let us know that she was playing with someone in the large courtyard. Some women in the family (at night after dinner they would all socialise away from work and male intervention relaxed; a very South Asian thing) would remark the way he would sometimes play away in a corner in the gigantic courtyard in the evening (evenings in the city — in a lot of villages 7-8pm is quite the night) - as if he was playing with someone. Something, at least two more toddlers in the family had attested to before him. They all were teens/adults later at that time. Even the description matched. I was a teen, who stayed in boarding schools, and had been bullied too much and sadly bullied others too much in the guise of ghosts and what not so I didn’t believe it, I don’t believe it now. But it was weird. I think it is some kind of family memory or shit. My later explanation is/was — someone scared those kids with such stories so that they won’t wander around alone at night and they kind of started living it.

Mine has perfectly sensible reasons from their point of view for a three year old.

Fortunately the problem door has an old security chain held in by by time and wishful thinking but good enough to keep her in for now.

I don't recall if we asked him why he did this, but we did make it clear that he should never leave the house alone at his age. Curiosity-wise, however, we generally let our kids explore the world on their own terms as long as it's not dangerous. And "dangerous", in our view, is understood to be "lasting permanent damage" (doing something that can lead to losing an eye is dangerous, doing something that can lead to breaking a finger is not dangerous).