montessori monday: the dressing basket

Before having Kale, one of my co-workers, who's husband works out of town for long stretches of time, told me that she does everything possible to prepare for her day the night before. In fact, she even pours her kids cereal and puts the spoon in her bowl so all she has to do in the morning is add milk. At that time, I thought she was mildly neurotic. Now I just think she's a genius. 

Like my co-worker, I do my best to get as much as possible ready to go the night before (bags packed, clothes laid out, etc.) and in the morning we've got a pretty solid routine. 

Everything was going pretty good until a couple weeks ago when Kale decided he wanted to pick his own clothes out and dress himself. I'm all for this, but we just do not have time for it. Have you seen a toddler try to put his own clothes on? It's painfully slow. And frustrating. And oh my....it just doesn't work well for us at 7:58am on a Monday morning. 

So when I saw the idea of a dressing basket, I was all "that's almost as smart as the spoon in the cereal bowl!" 

Step 1: Find an awesome basket. Ok, any basket will do. A shoe box would do. But I'd had my eye on a cute basket I saw at the grocery store but had no use for and couldn't justify buying and then - BOO-YEAH. Kale needs a basket. 

Step 2: Try to remember to have Kale pick out his clothes before we go to sleep. This saves us having to go through the process in the morning. 

Step 3: Put the basket of clothes out and ask him "what goes on first?" and let him figure it out. He still needs a lot of help with actually getting dressed, but he loves taking the lead and working on his independence. 

{if you're new here, this is Kale's version of a smile}

{step 4 - remove stickers you find stuck to your leg under your pj's}

If all else fails, you can always use your awesome dressing basket as an awesome cat bed: