Mommy Daycare: lit AF

Here I am, unexpectedly (but happily, most days… lol) a stay at home mom. I had a completely different vision of my life with Theo than we actually have now, because a lot of things have changed for us over the past year. We don’t leave our house much, due to COVID. I was laid off from my job, and we made the decision that it was best for our family for me to stay home for a while. We haven’t had many opportunities to connect with other moms and kids, in real life. So, I have tried to make our time at home as educational as possible. I always joke that Theo is in “mommy daycare,” since we expected me to go back to work and him to go to actual daycare (I guess at that point it’s more like preschool?).

I’ve been learning about some Montessori principles and really like most of them. Don’t get me wrong though, Theo watches plenty of Dora the Explorer as well. Montessori is classically defined as “freedom within limits” and I’d like to think of our parenting styles to be very Montessori-aligned. However there are a lot of rules and things that don’t make sense for us. For example, Montessori suggests that you put infants on the floor on just an open mattress. We use a crib here in this house, ha.

The main “Montessori” thing that we do is have rotating shelves for Theo’s toys, and I try and switch them out every few weeks. Most weeks have a theme. Here are some past toy themes that we have done.

The past several weeks the theme has been “I am tired and don’t feel like coming up with a theme, so random toys it is,” which has been completely fine also! We have since also moved his primary play area to our upstairs living room, so we will be implementing these principles upstairs too once we get everything set up to my liking, ha!

Most of our toys are from the Lovevery subscription boxes. I am OBSESSED with their toys. They all are so educational and have a purpose and Theo really enjoys playing with them. I wish I had an affiliate code (LOL) but they’ve recently changed their program. I can send you a $20 off code if you give me your email address!

What should our next play area theme be??