Since I published this post, I've been receiving a lot of questions, mainly about how I spend my days as a stay-at-home mom and what do we do to keep ourselves busy every day. Today I'm hoping to answer some of those questions.
Being a parent requires a lot of organizational and time management skills. Furthermore, it really puts your patience, confidence, and motivation to the test. But, believe me, being a stay-at-home mom pushes those boundaries quite a bit further. If in one hand you can miss your child to death when you're working a full-time job, spending twenty-four hours of your days with your kid can make you be on top of each other's nerves every once in a while. That's only normal and there is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of, you just need to find the best way to deal with it and, in my opinion, finding a nice routine really does help.
Even though I find it important to have some sort of raw plan of how you'd want to spend your days, that doesn't mean you need to have a strict schedule hanged on the wall, so please don't expect this to be an hour-on-hour daily plan. A great thing about being at home is the flexibility that it brings along, so take advantage of that! Besides, every kid and adult has a different internal schedule, so what may work for me and my kid may not work for you at all.
With that being said, to make it easier and keep somewhat of a consistency, there are some "core tasks" that I always keep as priorities in our schedule. These are sleep/nap time, eating time, playground and/or any appointments we may have. Everything else that we do revolves around these.
To simplify, I look at my days in two parts: The pre-nap (morning time) and the after nap (afternoon/evening). During nap time it's me time, and before and after that, my kid is my priority.
Morning
After we get up and have breakfast we leave the house. What we do out of the house mainly depends on the weather, so if it isn't raining we may take a long walk in the park, bike to the beach, go to the swimming pool, go to the petting farm or to the playground and have some fun with other kiddos. If the weather is gloomy and rainy we may choose to go to the city center and visit the toy stores, go to the library (depending on the weekdays they also have activities for the kids), do grocery shopping or arrange a playtime with friends.We leave the house every morning for at least half an hour. Even if this simply means to go for a walk around the neighborhood, I find it important to start the day getting some fresh air, see other people and scenery, especially when you don't have to commute to work every day. Plus, I find this to be a great way to teach kids how to behave and walk outside.
On the mornings when the weather just doesn't allow us to have as much fun outdoors, we choose to do some indoor activities, like exercise, dance, paint, any sort of crafts - imagination is the limit here.
Right before lunchtime, we come back home and while I prepare lunch Eva has her playtime where she can do whatever she wants, from playing with Yoko and Einstein (our bunnies) and her toys, read her books, etc. After this, we have lunch and then it's nap time.
Nap time
Depending on how tired she is, nap time can take anything between one to three hours. Very rarely she doesn't feel like sleeping at all, but because of this established schedule, she happily stays in bed for a while just playing with her toys or having some quiet time before I go pick her up.I usually spend her nap time working on blog posts, my illustration project, do some boring admin or do some more in-depth cleaning that it isn't as easy to do with a baby walking around.
Afternoon
This is usually the time we take to do some development activities, from puzzles, painting, get familiarized with the letters, numbers, shapes, colors, objects, and emotions, read books, that kind of stuff. We do this for as long as Eva shows interest. As soon as she shows signs of being bored or not paying as much attention to the activities, it is time for our afternoon snack.Depending on the time of the year, if the weather is nice we usually bring some outdoor toys to the backyard, to the park or to the beach, sometimes we do picnics there as well. During wintertime, however, it gets dark pretty much as soon as Eva wakes up from her nap so we tend to play more indoors (unless there's snow!) and do some arts and crafts, run around the backyard, search for frogs and bugs, collect fall leaves, etc. If I have some more work to do, I'll do it in between playing with her, otherwise, I will just tidy the house while she plays until dinner time.
Evening
Just before dinner, it's when I notice that Eva starts getting a bit more tired. So, if she asks, I let her watch some cartoons (one hour tops) or, if we don't have to wake up early the next day, we just watch a movie together, well, it's usually just half a movie anyways. After dinner, we read some books or play for a bit and she goes to bed as early as seven thirty in the evening.Playgroup days
As I mentioned before, even though I am at home full-time, I still find it crucial for kids to be away from their parents for shorts periods of times. Not only to get in touch with other kids and adults (and to learn the native language as well in our case) but especially to build their independence and consequently their self-confidence.So our child does go to a playgroup where she spends a few hours developing and playing with other kids, and on those days we do pretty much the same, only from mid-morning to evening.
Weekends
Weekends are the cheat days. There are no plans and if we skip one nap time because we are having fun outdoors, the world is not going to end. There are no schedules. We wake up when we want, get up and start the day as a family of three. We chill-out, relax and do whatever we feel like doing for those two days.
As the years go by, this schedule will definitely change, so perhaps if you're interested I'll make an updated version later on.
I hope you enjoyed this post. If you have any other questions please feel free to let me know in the comment section.
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