I have had a really pleasant summer off my toddler, but the end is looming. Don’t get me wrong, I love fall. Everything about the season is magical to me. But it also means I will have limited time to do the things I’ve lazily spent all day doing now. To get ahead of myself, I made a “Make Your Own Cleaning Schedule” that I will follow once I’m back to work. Make sure you scroll down to download it. There is an example I filled out and a blank one for you to make your own!
P.S. I moved into a larger house now and I’ve come up with a newer, better cleaning system that only takes 15 minutes a day! Make sure to check it out.
I am going to come right out and admit it: I am worried about showing you guys Mac’s bedroom. Not because there is anything wrong with it; but because every single time I look up stuff about floor beds, there are pictures of these super elaborate floor bed set-ups with highly decorated rooms. Honestly, Mac’s room is the opposite of that. But I finally decided I need to buck up and show you all her room because a Montessori toddler floor bed room doesn’t have to look like it came out of a catalog.
If you’d like to read the other posts in this series, I’ll post them here. First, I talked about how we never used a crib. Then I talked about what a floor bed is. Then I posted about how we shared our bedroom with a floor bed. Make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom for my #1 piece of advice on safety in a Montessori toddler floor bed room. (Also, check out my post about how despite this nice room, our toddler bed shares with us part time.)
When most people think of toddlers, they don’t find them to be very helpful. And they aren’t. But toddlers love to help and for a long time, they won’t be able to tell if what they are doing is actually helping you or not. Sometimes I give Mac a “job” like putting all of the socks in the laundry basket. It isn’t something I actually need done, but it makes her think she is helping. But there are some toddler chores that are helpful. We recently discovered that Mac loves to help feed our dog, Ralph. Here is how she helps us.
(P.S. Everyone wave to Andrew, the Nerd. He doesn’t feature prominently on the blog very often. Also, if you didn’t see my Facebook post, my dryer broke which is why my drying rack is living in the kitchen for the time being.)
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you buy through my link, I may receive compensation. Check my disclosure page for more information.
I try to do some art with Mac because I’m all for fine motor development with a side of creativity. But sometimes I don’t want to deal with messy crayons, chalk, or paint. (Plus Mac is teething right now, so all art supplies seem to end up in her mouth.) One art medium that parents don’t tend to think of is stickers. Doing stickers with toddlers takes supervision, but is otherwise so easy. We have them available on the art shelf in our Montessori toddler room and I have started to do them with Mac. Here is how I keep my sanity while doing stickers with toddlers.
Toddlers have no sense of time. That can make mornings afternoons all of the time really hard. How do you let your child know you are going to be leaving the playground so that they’ll understand? How do you get across that an event will happen, but not yet? There are three phrases I use to help a toddler understand time.
These phrases will seem really obvious, but let me tell you that I don’t hear them used often enough by parents. I tend to hear “We are leaving in 5 minutes” or something along those lines. Let me clue you in: toddlers have no idea what that means. So here are the phrases that really work.
Hi, my name is Mikki and I am a recovering TV addict. As a child, my family lived in the country and only had an antenna. We got 6 channels on a good day, 3 if it stormed. There wasn’t that much to watch so it wasn’t a problem. Fast forward to college and I was let loose into a dorm with cable television and a lot of time on my hands. Suddenly the colorful world of television was at my fingertips. I watched hour upon hour of any show I thought was remotely interesting.
As I got older and got more responsibilities, my television watching kept up, just after work and weekends. The screen was constantly lit up. When I got pregnant (and sicker than a dog), the television was a great distraction. Those early months of maternity leave were spent binge watching shows on Netflix. But then Mac got old enough to start paying attention to the television and I knew something had to change. So I came up with my rule about electronics.
I was so excited for summer to start this year so I could be home with Mac. I had all of these ideas to get things done around the house and on the blog while also having a great, fun summer with Mac. Of course that all went by the wayside when summer actually came and frustration set in. My house was still a mess and my to-do list never got shorter. Finally, I had to stop myself and ask why in the world I was getting nothing done when I had tons of time. After some soul (and Pinterest) searching, I finally came up with five secrets to stay at home mom productivity.
P.S. I have updated my tips! Make sure you check out the 8 easy tips I now have to be a productive stay at home mom.
P.P.S. I moved into a larger house now and I’ve come up with a newer, better cleaning system that only takes 15 minutes a day! Make sure to check it out.
I am a laid back mama. I have worked with kids for so long that not much phases me. I have dealt with the gamut of gross stuff and frustrating stuff so having my own child is no biggie. In fact, I tend to get along better with the second and third time moms I know vs. the first time moms like me. Maybe that is why I am so comfortable having a free range toddler.
Well, we had such a busy holiday weekend that I had hardly any time to work on the blog, which is a good thing. We all need a break sometimes 🙂 Our weekend was filled with family, fun, and food (but no fireworks. We were too tired to stay up.)
Out of all of the things I’ve inherited from my grandmother, one of them is the inability to look nice in an otherwise wonderful family picture.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you sign up through my link, I may receive compensation at no extra cost to you. For more information, see my disclosure page here.
At points in time, I have made money while working online. I’ve had bigger jobs (like search engine evaluator and online program managers where I worked for companies doing contract work) but I have also done several things like surveys that earned me chump change. I don’t mean like pennies, though. I mean chump change like not enough to pay the bills, but enough to afford some luxuries like fancy coffee or a dessert the next time we went out to dinner.
What’s nice about the sites I am going to recommend is that you can do them while caring for children. You can leave and come back to these jobs without being penalized.
