Friday, August 5, 2011

A Typical Day as a Stay-at-Home Mom

When my husband gets home in the evenings we talk about our day. Yesterday and today I decided to document my day in pictures.  I'm always telling my husband what my son, "Blue Rock," and I do but I don't usually take pictures to go along with it.  My husband suggested I blog about it. 

First of all, being a stay-at-home mom is the most exhausting job I have ever had.  On the flip side, it is also the most fun and rewarding. While every day is different and doesn't always go as smoothly as I had hoped, here is what a typical day at my house looks like. This is what we did today.

The night before I set out trays of activities for my son to complete the next day.  This is a hands-on and Montessori approach to education.  I just started the doing toddler trays, which I'll explain in a later post.  It basically keeps things organized and allows me to rotate different educational activities for my son to do.  It also helps me rotate his toys better.
Here are our trays of activities for the day
During breakfast we go over our weekly memory verse.After breakfast it's Calendar time.

Blue Rock loves calendar time and is getting really good at it.

Blue Rock picked tracing first today.  He traced two pages.  The more he practices, the better he gets.
Then I traced his hands, then he traced my hand, then I traced his feet.  I wanted him to just draw, but he wanted to trace hands and feet.
Then he went to play with his Mr. Potato Head.  He put the eyes and mouth in funny places and laughed and laughed.
After we got dressed, we met up with some friends and visited a small zoo.  In Germany, it's called a Tierpark.
He loved seeing all the animals and hanging out with his friend.
After lunch we worked on letters.  We played a letter matching game.  He matched capital and lower case letter As to the letters on the tree.  I bought a little curriculum that had this here.

Then we went over the letter J in his Hooked on Phonics for Preschool workbook. 
Next he went over shapes and colors.  This is Lauri Toys Shape and Color Sorter.
Then Blue Rock had free time to play while I got some things done.  During free time, he decided to throw a fit for about 45 minutes.  After trying to console but not giving in, I called my step-mother for advice while trying to decide the best way to handle his tantrum.  I finally decided to continue to ignore him and eventually he came downstairs and I gave him a hug and told him I love him.  I took my step-mother's advice and prayed for him.  That helped calm me and Blue Rock stopped crying.  I should have prayed earlier. Also, he was just fine. It wasn't long after he came downstairs that he was laughing and playing happily again. Sorry, no pictures of the tantrum.

I gave Blue Rock a snack and asked him if he wanted to play downstairs.  Of course he did!  Downstairs is his favorite place to play.  He went to the last activity I had for him today.

He sorted pom poms by color and placed them in rows in this ice cube tray I got for 1 Euro from IKEA.
Then sweet husband took us out to dinner to celebrate our 3rd anniversary in Germany.  We ate at our favorite Greek restaurant.
Being a mom is my favorite job! Lately, my photo shoots keep getting rained out, so I have had more time to focus on learning activities.  Being a stay-at-home mom is not boring. We're always busy, always learning, and always having fun.  I usually only have about 4 educational activities to do per day.  Since Blue Rock is only 2, I allow him to have plenty of free time to play and explore.  We also try and get out of the house at least once per day.  Sometimes it involves errands, other days going to the park, the pool, and visiting friends. The whole idea with the trays is to keep him working on skills I want him to master, allow him to complete an activity, and learn to put it away once he's done. So far this is working out really well for us.    

4 comments:

  1. Thats wonderful! i keep reading all your posts and wonder how you manage so much with all this creativity. Many times i end up being a guilty mom for not doing anough with my daughter.

    By hats off to you for being an awesome mom! And thanks for giving all ideas too.

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  2. Life Begins,

    Thank you for the encouraging words. I know what you mean about feeling like you're not doing enough. I feel that way too sometimes. I'm sure you're doing plenty with your daughter. I read your blog too and you're teaching her multiple languages and introducing her to lots of music and things. That's awesome! You are doing a great job and are an awesome mom!

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  3. Like your little fuzz balls in the IKEA tray idea -- have a couple of those trays and balls around that we could do that with.

    Thanks for all the fun learning ideas :)

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  4. Tiffany,

    Thanks. I love reading about what you do with your daughter as well.

    ReplyDelete

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