One of the core principles of Montessori pedagogy is the understanding that the child fully develops themselves by means of experience in their environment.

I’ve spent the better part of 13 months stressing the fact that I can not constructively give a true Montessori environment to our daughter. Since I found out I was pregnant, I’ve been scouring ideas on Pinterest and various home design sites trying to figure out how to construct separate spaces in a loft style apartment.

Getting pregnant was an unexpected miracle and it left us incredibly unprepared with our living situation. Our living space is about 800 square feet and shared between two full sized adults, a golden retriever, pomeranian, and now an infant!

For the most part, it’s all worked out pretty beautifully except for the fact that we bed share and my daughter keeps jumping off the cliffs of our king size and everything is perpetually covered in dog hair.

Keeping a small space like this clean is an all day chore. All it takes is a busy project, particularly rainy day, or weekend to have everything upside down and inside out. This makes it even more of a challenge when trying to provide an independent environment for our mobile infant to explore.

My original solution was to take a dog X-Pen and put it as a sort of perimeter to keep the dogs away. My main concern of separating her from the dogs was because our golden sheds like it’s raining and he has a tendency to chew her stuff.

The X-Pen looked ugly and like a gigantic baby jail/crate/pen/crib so I took some fabric and sewed it to look like a make-shift wall. I then spent the better part of two days combing the carpet, vacuuming the carpet, and then steam cleaning the carpet. We purchased some foam mats from Target and laid that on the main space of the floor.

We used a sheepskin thing for a little book corner for her and kept her topponcino in front of her mirror. This arrangement all seemed really fantastic and awesome until our infant blossomed into mobility. That’s when the real panic started because she promptly began flinging herself off the side of our four foot high bed.

Because Charlotte bed shares and we don’t have the space for her own bed, we decided to just turn our bed into a Montessori floor bed.

While it’s a little more inconvenient to roll out of bed, it’s nice to know that we can safely leave her in the bed to sleep without fear of her doing some serious damage by falling down.