Please share your little tricks that help you get through the day

Hi Ladies!

I have twin 19 month DD's and a 14 week old DS and I've picked up so many good ideas on here that have made life easier over the past 2 years... I wanted to share some of our little tricks that make life easier around here and I wondered if you all had some tricks of your own that you might share!

#1.... One thing that we do is that we have a little canvas tote that we have all of their socks, hats, and shoes in and they always have access to it..it provides hours of dress up fun at our house, it's easy to clean up and since I really don't care if they wear matching socks we have very quick and easy access to socks when we need them.

#2... Maybe everyone does this, but we keep tv off until their fav tv show comes on (at our house it's Elmo's World) and when it comes on they snuggle in on the couch together and watch together.. it gives me a little down time with the baby and it gets them wound down for naptime..

#3...this helped us a lot when they were around 12 months old.. we have a couple of old couches in the basement that we barely use and when they were too little to sit on the couch in our living room we brought up a long cushion from the basement couch and put a single bedsheet on it and put it in our playroom.. it not only is a cozy place to sit, but it's low enough to the floor that they can bounce on it and it is really a good place to keep stuffed animals.

#4..No bibs at our house.. we strip down to diapers for just about every meal.

#5.. Up until just recently we have found that baths in the kitchen sink are the way to go!

#6... we have a little box with special toys in it (like old cell phones)that they only get to play with during diaper changes. After the diaper change the toys go back into the box. If they flip over or fight the diaper change the toy immediately goes back into the box until they are calm.

#7 We rely heavily upon healthy breakfast foods to fill in the "gaps" for a lot of meals.. like oatmeal with raisins and cinnamon sugar, cheerios, toast..

#8 We found a FANTASTIC discipline philosophy that we follow and it makes life SO much easier and DH and I are much less likely to be frustrated when we have discipline issues. It's called "Love and Logic: Early Childhood"

#9 Lately we have REALLY been into taking clothes and diapers off and it has really helped to have a designated "naked time" at our house..we set a timer and they take clothes off and run around. when the timer goes off on our microwave the fun is over! They are much less likely to take clothes off during the day if we give them this naked time!!!!

#10 Our DS has a bunch of "special toys" that we get out when he "plays"... they are actually the girls' old baby toys that they are very possessive of.. they are also very rough right now with the baby. I lay out a big blanket on the floor and we take out the toys and play with them on the blanket. Other toys are not aloud on the blanket and the baby toys stay on the blanket.. it keeps the baby safe and the girls occupied!!

 

Packing paper and crayons. I bought the girls Crayola washable fat crayons and spread out the packing paper from our Amazon orders. (We get diapers that way so we have plenty of paper.) The paper covers half the playroom, so they don't run out of coloring space and start coloring the walls.

 

You can never have too many doodle pro's. I keep a couple small ones in the truck, a couple small ones in the diaper bag, and we have 2 big ones in the house (which I may replace this christmas, they are wearing out, and we've already replaced one that wore out from my older kids! ). Fantabulous toy, I could kiss whoever designed it.

I repack my diaper bag when i get home, so I don't get some where in a few days and realize I'm out of diapers. On a similar note, we used to keep a small diaper bag with extra clothes and diapers in the truck so we always had spare clothes and extra diapers in a diaper blow out emergency. Kept my "all the time" diaper bag smaller and not so heavy.

 

These 2 tips are awesome. I am going to look for that book. My girls (22 months) seem to be fighting all the time and needing some sort of discipline but I'm looking for different strategies then what we did with DS. I feel what we did with him, which was pretty much just time outs, lead to lots of frustration all round.

The naked thing is great too since I usually have a heck of a time keeping clothes on my 2 (maybe it's a girl thing, lol).

 

I rotate toys about every 4 days or so...I have a few different baskets that I rotate between...when it seems like nothing else works to satisfy my boys...I bring out the toys they haven't seen for awhile and they look at them like WOW...new toys! and it keeps them occupied for awhile!!

 

[#6... we have a little box with special toys in it (like old cell phones)that they only get to play with during diaper changes. After the diaper change the toys go back into the box. If they flip over or fight the diaper change the toy immediately goes back into the box until they are calm.

I am definitely going to try this as I struggle to get them to lie still when changing diapers.

I also rotate toys.

I have a toy basket in their room, living room and kitchen, this means that we can tidy away the toys very quickly at the end of the day. Whatever is in that room goes into the basket.

My parents live an hour's drive away from us and I keep toys there, this means less to pack and it is special to play with.