I’ve often mentioned the process of rotating toys in and out of storage in a Montessori environment to keep the space orderly, decluttered, attractive, inviting, and stimulating. Aside from Discovery Baskets, we don’t use big baskets to corral huge piles of toys. Instead, every item has its own spot on the shelf and we rotate the activities/toys out every couple weeks with items that are stored out of sight. 

The truth is, I haven’t done much rotating. Matt and I don’t buy a lot of stuff, so by the time I put toys on the three shelves in the living room and the shelf in his bedroom, I

Have you been reading Kylie’s posts about starting toilet learning with Otis who is about a month younger than Henry?

Around these parts, we definitely starting putting Henry on a baby toilet at a young age (sporadically), but we were never really good about reading his cues and therefore never became Elimination Communication gurus. Now at fifteen months, he mainly wears training pants when we’re home, but they still primarily work like diapers. We try to take him to the toilet at regular intervals, but he only uses the toilet about half the time. We’ve still been putting him in his cloth diapers for naps, traveling, and daycare. 

I think

If you’ve been around a while, you might remember that I was torn about whether or not to introduce a pacifier into Henry’s life when he was infant. The pure Montessori books recommend against it, but the only way to soothe Henry to sleep was walking (since I decided early on not to use breastfeeding to soothe, due to nipple soreness) and walking wasn’t a good option for me because of my prolonged lochia. 

When he was four weeks-old, we took him to an outdoor silent film event at the park downtown, and a family near us had a son just four weeks older than Henry. While Matt wore Henry