A Day in the Life of a Stay-at-Home Mama!

I decided to document my day yesterday to share with Collin.  I'm always telling him about what Caden and I do but don't usually take pictures to go along with it.  Collin suggested I blog about it.  So here is what a typical day at our house looks like.

The night before I set out trays of activities.  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 Caden as well as his toys.

I have 4 main activites for Caden to do in the cubes on the right

During breakfast we usually say a memory verse.
Then we start our day out with Calendar Time -
we go over the months of the year, days of the week, weather, etc.
I got this cool magnetic calendar from Oriental Trading Company

The first thing Caden wanted to do was play with the sensory box.
We read Bugs! Bugs! Bugs! Then he got to play with the bugs.

Then Caden wanted to paint.  He chose the Dot Paint - love this stuff!

Then he saw some birds or something interesting outside.

Once he put up the dot paint, he wanted to play
the Teddy Mix & Match Game

After about 5 minutes he decided to dump the all the pieces out,
put them back in the box, dump them out again, get the instructions,
then do a yoga stance and look over the instructions.

Then we went to the library and played at the park for about 30 minutes.
Since I didn't take pictures there I'll post a picture from yesterday.
See our new swing set?  Caden decided to wear his rain boots when
we went outside.

After we ran a few errands and met Collin for lunch, we came
home and Caden went to work on his last tray activity for the day.
He had three animal puzzles to complete.  He named the animals,
made the sound of the animal (if it makes one), and we read two
bilingal animal books.  These books are English/Spanish. I need to
find more English/German kids books.

Then we headed upstairs for free-play, let mommy get some work done, and play basketball. While I was upstairs working on something, Caden went downstairs.  I came downstairs to this - Caden eating Gold Fish in the living room.  We don't eat in the living room and yesterday he had climbed up on the kitchen counter and grabed some Ritz crackers and sat happily on the couch eating them.  Today he said, "eating Gold Fish Crackers by the couch."  I asked him where we eat food and he picked up the Gold Fish and ran to the kitchen.

Caden took the Gold Fish, sat on the floor in the kitchen and started spinning around in circles.

After giving Caden a snack, I decided to bring out one more activity.  I had him color sort some pom poms.  He did a great job lining them up by color.  I bought this ice cube tray from IKEA for 1 Euro and was waiting to put it on one of the trays. 

Seeing Caden complete something he's never done before is one of the most rewarding parts of my day.  I will probably add this activity to tomorrow's fun.

I hope you enjoyed a glimpse of my day as a stay-at-home mom.  We're always busy, always learning, and always having fun.  I usually only have about 4 eductional activities to do per day.  Then he gets 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 visitng 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.   

To read about Friday's activities, click here.