Better Than a Playpen – A Baby Play Yard
If your child has just started crawling or walking, you know what a chore it can be to keep them out of mischief. Once on the ground, everything is a target for their thirst for exploration. Soon, you spend most of your day following around baby and hovering over them to keep baby out of mischief. By the time they are down for the night, you are thoroughly exhausted.
Other Mom’s know that it’s true. A mother’s work is in no way finished, especially when your little one begins to take off by themselves. Luckily there is an answer that can both keep them safe and present you those valuable minutes of sanity to clean up, fix dinner or do all of those things Mom’s do to keep the family running smoothly.
Back when our generation was little, most of our mom’s had your standard playpens for us. These playpens were often big and clunky and had plush plastic railings that cracked when we bit it and netting around the sides. These days, you don’t see lots of of those. They occupied too much space and just weren’t as sturdy as they might have been. These days, we have a few basic options for fencing in baby – the pack and play and the baby play yard.
A pack and play is much like a small version of your traditional playpen. A pack and play will fold up when they aren’t being used and are easy to travel with which is a handy feature. Many also have acome with aare equipped with ahave a detachable bottom for simple cleaning. The only trouble with a pack and play is that most are too little to keep a mischevious older baby or toddler content for more than a minute.
Once baby grows out of that, the next level up is called a baby play yard. These contraptions look more like small fences than they do a standard playpen. They are bigger with some of them basically “room sized”. What is especially wonderful about these is that you may literally enclose baby in while providing them access to all of their much loved toys but without the worry of them getting in to anything, grabbing the TV, rummaging through drawers and all of that fun stuff they can otherwise do. For babies and toddlers who don’t welcome being confined, a baby play yard is an outstanding option.
A baby play yard has no “bottom”, it sits directly on the ground. They are also handy for outdoor use, making it easy to set up a enclosure on the spot for outdoor activities or just gardening with your baby. A play yard does disassemble effortlessly and travel well. A baby play yard will last well beyond the baby phase and directly in to the toddler years for keeping your little one safe and sound and out of trouble.
