Play & Mess
Should Toys Live in the Living Room
We fought this battle for a year before giving in and letting toys colonize the living room. Here is why I stopped resisting and what I still keep out of it.
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Author · Devon Ashworth
I write Growing Up at Home from a house with two kids five years apart and a hallway that squeaks in all the wrong places. Most of what I know here I learned by doing it badly first, which is why the mistakes stay in the articles.
The Year We Childproofed Everything and Still Missed the Stapler
We spent a whole weekend locking down every outlet and cabinet in the house, and our daughter still found the one dangerous…
Bedtime Is Not One Event, It Is Four
I spent years treating bedtime as a single hard stop instead of a sequence, and once I broke it into stages, the…
Bins Beat Baskets: What I Learned Reorganizing Our House Around Actual Kid Behavior
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The Messy Play I Stopped Fighting
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What I Put on the Fridge for School Emails
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The Dinner Hour We Had to Renegotiate
Dinner kept sliding later and later until it collided with bedtime. Fixing the timing meant admitting our old plan had quietly stopped…
How Feeding a Toddler Rearranged Our Entire Kitchen
Somewhere between purees and picky eating, our kitchen quietly reorganized itself around a two year old, and I did not notice how…
The Toy Rotation That Actually Stuck
I tried rotating toys three different ways before landing on a version simple enough that I still do it a year later.…
Sleep Training Turned Our Hallway Into a Minefield of Squeaky Floorboards
The week we started sleep training, I learned every creaking board in our hallway by heart, because one wrong step could undo…