I have a deep love for small businesses. I grew up with small business owner parents. When possible I try to support small businesses. As a creator, I also feel it is my responsibility to share small businesses. This post shares some of my favorite small businesses we love in our Montessori home: businesses where your money supports a family.

This gift guide includes my favorite hand-selected gifts from birth to 3 years old. It includes both what we are getting our children and our favorite items in our home. The list is divided into sections so as not to be too overwhelming but to give a variety of Montessori-inspired options.

Are you considering a Montessori floor bed? You’ve come to the right place! This post goes through why you should choose a Montessori floor bed and the best options on the market. Put simply, a Montessori floor bed refers to a low bed for a baby or toddler to use instead of a crib. They are lower than a toddler bed so that younger babies can safely use them.

If you’re looking to design a Montessori home the entryway is a great place to start. This is a place you can provide your child with accessibility and the tools for independence as they prepare to come in and out of the house. With a place for shoes, a seat, hooks, and a mirror you can provide an intentional Montessori entryway in your home.

With my baby on the move we have a whole new sibling dynamic. This blog posts discusses how we are handling the changes and some things we have done to make it easier for them to harmoniously share a play space.

Check out this super easy DIY for a Montessori-inspired land, sea, and air sorting mat for your toddler. This easy DIY can be used to sort animals or vehicles and is a great early sorting activity for a toddler as well as a language activity.

Which should you choose the Toniebox or the Yoto player? We have both and in this blog post I share our experience with the two screen-free audio players. Find out which I would recommend to you! Both devices are made for young children to play music and audio independently but have several differences.

Planning a trip with your toddler? I know flying with a toddler can be really intimidating! In this blog post I share our favorite toddler plane activities from when my son was aorund 15 months to now at almost 2.5. I also share what I look for in activities to bring on the plane!

Are you interested in introducing jigsaw puzzles but not sure where to start? Puzzles are such a great activity for toddlers because they develop their concentration, problem-solving skills, and fine motor skills. Puzzles are a wonderful and affordable addition to a Montessori home as they can often be purchased for inexpensive or secondhand. This post covers how we introduced jigsaw puzzles from the simplest 2-piece ones to 48-piece puzzles in our Montessori home.

Are you interested in introducing puzzles to your toddler or older baby but not sure where to start? Interested in what a Montessori puzzle progression might look like? You’ve come to the right place! This blog series will go through our full puzzle progression from the simplest single-piece puzzles my son started in infancy to the 48-piece puzzles he is working on now at 2. This first post covers peg puzzles (and similar inset puzzles that lack pegs).

Does your toddler throw EVERYTHING? Do you constantly find things in weird places because your toddler moved them? Have you noticed your toddler loves hanging upside down? All of these could possibly be explained by play schemas! In child development play schemas are patterns of behavior seen in play. There are 9 play schemas: transportation, trajectory, rotation, positioning, connection, enclosure, enveloping, transforming, and orientation. This post goes through why play schemas are helpful in understanding your child's behavior and how to spot them. It also includes activities for each of the play schemas.

I love Montessori in the newborn stage because it is a real reminder of what Montessori is actually about. It’s not about the toys, but about following the child and showing them respect. So much of the newborn stage is responding to their needs, getting to know them as a unique person, holding them when they ask, narrating our actions before we move their bodies. The most important “toy” to a newborn is you. Looking in their eyes and talking is one of the most enriching activities.

If you’ve been here before you might know for a while I was doing these monthly. I realized it wasn’t sustainable but also I can share way more about the progression to share on a three-month basis. There was so much learning between 21 and 24 months and I look forward to jumping in and talking about it! He was really into shelf work this month including some activities such as shape sorters and puzzles he hadn’t particularly loved in the past. Instead of simply going through our shelf since we had a few rotations during this time, I am going to discuss several categories: puzzles, matching, color matching, and fine motor work.

I can hardly believe my son is turning 2! With limited space in our small apartment and so many of the basics already covered I definitely struggled a bit to decide what to get him this year. I ended up finding a set of gifts I think he will really enjoy though. In this guide, I share Montessori-inspired gifts for two-year-olds along with the gifts we are getting my son at the end of the post.

If you’ve been here before you know I love cooking with my toddler. Throughout the past year or so we have figured out so much that has made the experience way smoother and easier. It goes very smoothly now but it was absolutely messy when we started! On this post I am doing a walkthrough of what doing a recipe looks like from preparing the space to actually making it with lots of tips along the way.

My number one recommendation to purchase for cooking with toddlers is a learning tower or sous chef tower. These are a classic in the Montessori world because they allow toddlers to become more active participants in cooking. This item is, without question, our most loved baby item behind possibly the baby wrap.

Where do you start? This is quite possibly my most asked question when it comes to cooking with toddlers or even our Montessori home more generally. It is also a question I struggle a bit with because I don’t have a straightforward answer. But, I will do my best to share our experience along with some of my tips here. This will be the first in a series I will share about introducing different aspects of cooking.

Is babywearing Montessori? This is a question I have gotten many times about Montessori. Many know that Montessori prioritizes freedom of movement and are concerned that babywearing goes counter to that. They may also see Montessori as being about independence and babywearing as hindering that.

Two weeks is not a particularly long amount of time, I acknowledge that. However, I feel we have settled in a bit in the past two weeks and I want to record some of my reflections on this time. The first weeks with a newborn are intense and I know the details of these days will someday be forgotten. I will transition, I hope, someday to three and then more than that, but the transition to two is unique in many ways.

We spent a full month traveling from 19.5-20.5 months so this month is a combined shelf post from the past two months! Come see our Montessori shelf at 19 and 20 months.