God, works in mysterious and wonderful ways, y’all! I do plan what blog posts I want to write, but the majority of the time God places something on my heart last minute and those posts get pushed to later… or never 🤣. God put this post on my heart very early last week to write, and I really didn’t know why until today.
I’m a stay-at-home mom (#SAHM) with a 4-month-old baby, so this quarantine-induced pandemic isn’t much different from my daily life, but for most moms, this is The Shining! Mamas love their kiddos, but all of a sudden, they have to learn how to balance working at home, momming, and wife-ing all at the same time — a skill I’ve been working on for 4 months and still don’t have it down!
Related: How to Manage Your Time with a Newborn
Take a moment, Mom and BREATHE! I’ve been doing this for a third of a year and still have moments where I have no idea what I’m doing — AND THAT’S OKAY! Take it one moment at a time!
If you’re a mama with a baby who is usually in daycare all day, you have probably already run out of ideas by now of how to keep him entertained. Well, look no further, Mama! I would love to share my flexible schedule and ideas with you to help you come up with tons of fun activities for you and your little one!
Flexible Baby Playtime Schedule
If you’re like me, an hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute schedule just stresses you out even more! If you miss one activity or something takes longer than it was supposed to, it throws off your whole day! I need a flexible schedule that tells me what to do without telling me what to do… you know what I mean?
You may also like: A Work-At-Home Mom’s Flexible Schedule
When making my schedule, I knew my son, Joshua, is awake between naps 4 times a day. I also knew I wanted my play times to be purposeful by choosing activities that worked on his 4 main developmental areas: physical, cognitive, linguistic, and social/emotional. I placed each developmental area in a time-slot that I knew I would have the appropriate amount of energy for at that time of day (I am not a morning person, so I knew I wasn’t going to put “physical skills” before noon, but I also didn’t want it to be right before bedtime either).
One thing that makes this schedule so flexible is that you can move things around for your — and your baby’s — personalities, preferences, schedule, etc. And the second reason is that you will not grow bored doing the same activities over and over day in and day out because you will have a plethora of activities to choose from — and as your baby grows, he will need new activities to help develop new skills.
Developmental Skills For Babies
Here are the skills your little one will be learning for the first year of his life:
Linguistic/Communication Development
Babbling, gestures, communication, speaking, and comprehending.
Social/Emotional Development
Interactions, attachment, self-awareness, and independence.
Physical Development
Reflexes, posture, senses, head control, movement, coordination, rolling over, sitting up, finger dexterity, crawling, hand coordination, standing, and walking.
Cognitive Development
Exploration, memory, attention, abstract thinking, knowledge, imitating, and musical skills.
What you need to know before you print the schedule…
- Grab the free printable below and make sure you check out both pages — page 1 is the actual schedule, and page 2 is activities for each developmental skill.
- Some activities encourage multiple skills (BONUS!!) — for instance, helping your baby play with her feet promotes both physical and social/emotional skills — so you can use those activities in other areas, but they were mainly placed where they were because it most obviously promotes that skill.
- I chose activities that would work for a range of ages so that this chart wouldn’t just be beneficial to a specific group of moms, and so you could use these activities for a while!
- You can follow my Pinterest board I created with lots of fun developmental activities for even more activity options!
- These activities don’t have to last very long. Your little one will probably become tired and/or overwhelmed after about 10-30 minutes.
- I highly suggest downloading the Kinedu app! This app keeps track of your baby’s developmental skills and specifically gives you an activity that will help you and your little one work on the skills they should be learning next. It gives a quick, weekly assessment to see what your baby has mastered so it can update the videos you are seeing. We use the free version and absolutely love it! The free version gives you 3 free activities a day and each video starts off by telling you what developmental area is being promoted in that skill. The paid version (about $40 a month) gives you access to the full video library, but I personally find that unnecessary for me and Joshua. I start our day by watching the three available videos and noting what skills they encourage, then making a mental note to do those activities during the appropriate scheduled time. *** If you are reading this during the Corona Virus Quarantine, from now until 4/15/20, Kinedu has opened their entire library for free to help us all out during this terrifying and confusing time!
You may also be interested in: 20 Newborn Must-Haves in 2020
👇🏼Snag my FREE PRINTABLE Baby Playtime Schedule! 👇🏼
I hope you get so much out of this schedule I created for you! But most importantly, I hope you get tons of wonderful memories with your sweetheart!
What activity do you think your little one will love? What activity isn’t included that you would like the share with other mamas? Tell us in the comments below!
Know any mamas who have suddenly become a work-from-home mama? Share this post with them!
You’ve got this, Mom!
You’ve Got This, Mom! 
Great info as always. You amaze me. Love u
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