The playroom evolves.

I can’t believe I”m showing anyone this, but this is a photo of what the living room looked like from about January until March or so.

DISASTER. That blow-up mattress you see towards the left side of the photo stayed up FOREVER — it was there for Mom when she came at the beginning of January and then stayed up for months and months and months. We used it for everything — to change babies on, to watch TV on, to grab cat naps, to sleep on when Jack had one of his weird wake-up-at-3am moments and we had to take him out to the living room to sleep.

Once the babies started getting more mobile — and doing things other than sleeping and eating — we knew we had to find a place where they could start to roll around and do tummy time. Our attention turned to the sun room, an odd room off of our living room that we’ve never really known what to do with. Since the nursery turned into the nursery it had kind of become where I put all of my craft stuff; but once we had crawling babies, that stuff was going to have to be relocated anyway, what with it being mostly scissors, glue, needles, and other things that you definitely didn’t want your babies little hands getting into. So we decided to make the sun room the play room.

This room turns out to be great for babies because it gets so much light.

We bought a carpet remnant at Olympia Carpets in Chicago. I think we paid a little over $100 for about an 8X10 remnant, and that included them sewing the edges as well as the most plush carpet padding for underneath. All in all, this was a great (and cost-effective) solution for a long time.

Then they started moving around a little more, and there wasn’t enough room in there, what with all the stuff we had sitting around on the carpet. So we did this:

We paid $100 for the play yard — got it on Craigslist — it’s about four of those sets put together, so it was a pretty good deal. See the black duct tape in between the pieces? We had to do that to keep Emmeline from using those spots for methods of escape. If you get this brand of play yard I highly recommend you do the same — it doesn’t take much for a baby to hoist themselves over. The foam squares also came from Craigslist and were a steal for $25. There are issues with toxicity with most of these foam squares but the research shows that the toxicity dissipates over time, and these were over a year old, so we figured they would be fine. The foam mats over the carpet make for a very soft landing for anyone learning to walk. This was an IDEAL space for them and saved my life for about a month, then they started vehemently protesting when I would leave them in there and leave the room…it’s still a great place for them to play as long as we’re within their sight.

The jumparoos are probably going to be gone within the month. They were super while they lasted but they’re really not that interested in them anymore.