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Browsing Tag: Infant
I will be the first one to admit that I am an introvert and a homebody. Maternity leave sounded like an absolute dream to me, especially because I got to be off for seven months! (Yay for summers off as a teacher.) But I think anyone would go stir-crazy being stuck at home alone with a newborn for 8 hours a day. So I made a simple rule for myself that I followed through most of my maternity leave and it helped me stay sane.
From the time Mac was born, I tried really hard to not keep her strapped into one kind of chair or another. She occasionally sat in her swing. And obviously she would be in her (not bucket) car seat in the car. But otherwise she was either sitting with me or down on the floor, free to explore her own space. I believe whole heartedly in giving a toddler and even a baby freedom of movement. But it can be a little scary. Here’s how I gave Mac freedom of movement without also giving myself a heart attack.
When Mac was born, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with her. She slept and ate, but how in the world do you play with a baby? I discovered that there are four very easy activities that should be done with every Montessori baby.
Eating as a family is so important. I am totally savoring the fact that right now we can have a nice dinner together almost every night. As Mac and any future siblings get older and busier, it will be harder to sit down together. But right now, we manage to have nice family dinners. I have come up with four different things we use to make dinner extra special on an otherwise normal night.
As I have written about before, we never used an infant seat with Mac. Many people would question us about how we managed to make things work without one. It was much easier than expected to carry her around. There are three, very simple ways we managed to still go out and about without an infant seat. Two were helpful when she was younger and the third is one we still use today.
The toddlers in my room bring their own lunches everyday. And there is one thing I frequently see in there that I hate with a passion: food pouches. I’m talking about the applesauce pouches and yogurt tubes. Most of you will probably say things along these lines:
“But my kids love them!”
“But they are so easy to throw in a lunch box!”
“But my kids can eat them in the car seat on the way to school!” (although for more on why kids shouldn’t snack in the car, read this post.)
Well let me tell, there are three big reasons (and one small reason) why I hate them.
Snacking in the car seems so prevalent nowadays. Many children in my school come in covered in crumbs from eating breakfast in the car. Some are even upset because they have had to leave their sippy cup in the car. And I’m left wondering what happened to eating at a table. I talked a little about that yesterday in my post about using an open glass instead of a sippy cup with toddlers.
Now hear me out, I get it. Sometimes you are on a road trip and you have to get somewhere and can’t stop. Or every once in a while you have a morning where everything goes wrong and the only thing you can do is shove a granola bar at your kid as you pull out of the driveway. We all have those days.
But there are two major problems that come from regularly snacking in the car and no, a dirty car isn’t one of them.
There have been stories in the news lately about sippy cup lids getting all moldy and disgusting. There is a really easy solution to that, but most people don’t want to hear it. It makes them nervous and uneasy. They have lots of questions about how in the world you can make it work. But I have a really easy solution to make sure your child isn’t drinking mold: get rid of the sippy cups and use an open glass instead. Yes, even for babies and toddlers.
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I am working towards being a minimalist in my entire life. It might be a struggle, but I am definitely a minimalist when it comes to raising a child. There were plenty of things that were “must-haves” that we didn’t buy and haven’t missed. One thing we did accumulate, however, was cloth diapers. Now, I have been good and I don’t have a ginormous stash (although it is hard not to buy every single cute cloth diaper I find), but I have found three cloth diaper accessories that we couldn’t live without. One can even be used with disposable diapers too. (Make sure you take a listen to my cloth diapering 101 podcast.)
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you buy through my link, I may receive compensation at no extra cost to you. For more information, see my disclosure page here.
When Mac was too old for a co-sleeper bassinet (read about where she slept as a newborn here), she moved into a Montessori floor bed. I already explained what a floor bed is and why we chose it (read about that here), but today I wanted to talk about where we set up the floor bed to start with.
Once Mac grew out of the bassinet, I already knew I wanted to have her in the floor bed. The problem was our two bedroom townhouse had our bedroom and another “bedroom” masquerading as a storage unit. I also wasn’t ready to have Mac move so far away from me. So I started to search the internet, looking for inspiration to share a room with Mac and her Montessori floor bed. But I couldn’t find anyone who had a floor bed in their own bedroom. Well, we went on to successfully share a room with Mac’s bed for six months, so I thought I would talk about how we did it.
Update: If you’d like to see her floor bed after she moved into her own room, you can read about it here. Make sure you also check out why she bed shares with us part time.
