Hellobee

I love a good parenting hack and thought I’d round up some of our favorites:

Use an old t-shirt as a smock. We saw our daycare doing this when we picked Lion up after a long day of painting and cooking in the toddler room. It looked like a great idea and we didn’t have to purchase anything new; we just put one of Mr. Dolphin’s old t-shirts on over Lion’s clothes and it works wonderfully. Plus, little tiny children swimming in giant shirts is a pretty adorable sight.

Warm towels in the dryer for after bath. We don’t do this regularly, but sometimes the kids’ bath time will coincide with when we have laundry going. Throwing a couple of towels into the dryer helps a non-full load of laundry dry faster and, as a great bonus, the towels are warm for when we pull the kids out of the bath.

Wash Velcro bibs in a lingerie bag (socks too!). When we only had Lion, his tiny clothes didn’t produce a large enough load to run on their own. I would combine his clothes with ours, but inevitably, a Velcro bib would attach itself to our clothes when we ran it through the dryer. We started putting the Velcro bibs in a lingerie bag to prevent it from ruining any more clothes (we also stopped buying Velcro bibs, but many still ended up being gifted to us). Once Lion started losing socks like crazy, we threw the socks in the bag too to keep them all together.

Use a sticker in shoes to differentiate left from right. We haven’t done this yet, but I recently saw a hack that cut a sticker in half and placed the left half of the sticker in the left shoe, and the right half in the right shoe. Put the shoes together correctly and the correct image can be seen, helping kids figure out which shoe goes on which foot.

Wear a zip-up hoodie over your work clothes. My two little ones were both acid reflux spit-up machines as infants. Even when we improved the situation by switching to Enfamil A.R., Lion still spit up fairly frequently and Panda routinely projectile vomited. Most of the time, the spitting up would occur after I’d changed into my work clothes, often moments before heading out the door. I started wearing a zip up hoodie over my work clothes until the second we would leave the house to avoid having to change my clothes twice in one morning. This would also work with a lab coat.

Duct tape or painters tape for hotel rooms. If you’re concerned about the outlets in hotel rooms, bring a roll of duct tape (sturdier) or painters tape (easier to remove) with you. You can tape over the outlets so that tiny fingers don’t make their way in.

Use a laundry basket in the bathtub. I posted about this hack awhile back and we still love it! The kids take a bath together and Panda goes in the laundry basket, helping keep his bath toys closer to him and preventing an overeager Lion from knocking his brother down.

What are your favorite parenting hacks?