Soft floors and safe corners since 2018
For the months on the floor
Your baby is about to spend a year on the floor. These are the mats that make that floor warm and wipeable, and the pens that give it an edge - measured in inches, so you can work out before you order whether your room takes one.
Three jobs, three shelves
Rolling and reaching wants padding. Pulling up and walking off wants an edge. Sitting up at the table wants a chair. The shelves are cut that way rather than by material.
Before you order
The mat is the largest thing you will put on that floor, so this is worth five minutes with a tape measure. Six things to check.
Measure the space you would leave clear, not the room. A coffee table you will push back on Saturday and drag out on Sunday is not clear floor.
Four tenths of an inch is under most interior doors, but check yours: a door that catches the edge will lift it, and a lifted edge is a lip a new walker finds.
That is the size most people take. It fits a sofa end with three feet to spare and it folds down to roughly the footprint of a small suitcase.
Take this one if two children use it, if the floor underneath is tile or laminate, or if you would rather not move the mat every time somebody crawls off the edge.
The 47 by 47 footprint is the panels. Allow a hand’s width around it so the mesh is not pressed against a radiator or a baseboard.
It stands on whatever is already there. If that is a hard floor, you want a mat under it, and one of the pens on this site arrives with one in the box.
Where people start
Sorted by how many people have rated them, which is a number we did not set. The price is from our last update.
play mat
4.4 · 4,007 ratings
from $33.14
play mat
4.4 · 4,007 ratings
$28.07
playpen
4.4 · 1,425 ratings
from $42.99
play mat
4.4 · 1,389 ratings
$44.75
playpen with a mat
4.8 · 52 ratings
$55.99
play mat
4.4 · 4,007 ratings
$49.99
What is under your baby
A mat is a simple object and the whole of it matters, so here is what it is made of and what each layer does.
XPE is a closed-cell foam. Each cell holds its own air, so a mat this thin still has spring in it and a spilled bottle sits on top instead of soaking in.
Both faces are printed, so the mat is two rooms in one object: animals on the side your baby likes, the quieter pattern on the side you like.
A damp cloth takes off what a day on the floor leaves. There is no cover to strip and no cycle to run.
The mat folds along printed creases to about a third of its open size, which is the difference between a thing you put away and a thing that lives in the corner of the room.
Every mat in the UANLAUO catalog is built the same way, so the choice is the print rather than the construction.
The honest part
A pen with no floor is not a play yard, and neither a mat nor a pen is a place to sleep. Both of those matter more than the price.
These pens are fabric panels over tube with mesh on all four sides and a zip gate on the outside. They stand on your floor: there is no base in the box unless you buy the one that comes with a mat. That is the whole design, and it is why the panels give when a new walker lands on them.
It also means these are not play yards in the sense the federal rule uses. The Consumer Product Safety Commission defines a play yard as a framed enclosure that includes a floor, and it treats a play yard as a place a baby may sleep. A pen with no floor is neither of those things. Use it for the fifteen minutes it takes to make lunch, with you in the room, and use a crib or a bassinet for sleep.
That is the sentence the people at UANLAUO would rather you read before the price than after it.
A mat is padding and a pen is a boundary. Neither is a sleep space: the federal definition of a play yard is a framed enclosure that includes a floor, and the enclosures here have no floor of their own. The Consumer Product Safety Commission asks parents to use products intended for sleep - a crib, a bassinet, a play yard or a bedside sleeper that meets federal requirements - and to move a baby to one of those if they fall asleep somewhere else. Neither a mat nor a pen replaces an adult in the room, and nothing on this site should be read as saying otherwise.
Why the floor matters this early
The figures below are the institute’s, not ours. They are the reason a mat is bought at two months rather than at eight.
Tummy time means putting your baby on their front while they are awake and you are watching. It strengthens the neck, shoulder and arm muscles they need before sitting, crawling and walking, and it helps prevent flat spots on the back of the head.
Most babies can start a day or two after birth with two or three sessions of three to five minutes. By about two months the institute’s total is fifteen to thirty minutes a day. That is the arithmetic a mat is bought for: half an hour a day on a floor that is warmer than boards and easier to clean than a rug.
Nothing in the UANLAUO way makes a baby do any of that. A mat is the surface it happens on.
Asked for by name
Three sizes parents ask for by name, and the pieces made in each of them.
Fifty-nine by fifty-nine inches is the size that fits the room most people are asking about: one cleared corner of a living room, twenty-four square feet, and a fold that goes behind a door. It is also the footprint the widest choice of prints is made in, so this page is the one to start on if you have decided how much floor you can spare and are choosing between the animals.
There is a moment when the mat you bought stops being the place your baby plays and starts being the place they set off from. The large sheets answer that: 79 by 71 inches covers a room end rather than a corner, at thirty-nine square feet, and it is the size households with two children on the floor at once end up buying second if they did not buy it first.
Forty-seven inches square is the pen that fits between a sofa and a wall in an ordinary living room, and it is where most people start. The two versions on this page differ in one thing that matters more than the price: whether a mat comes in the box. A pen has no floor of its own, so that question is really a question about what your baby will be sitting on.
Who makes these
There are five mat designs on this site and three pens. That is the whole range, and there is a reason it is not thirty.
UANLAUO has been making foldable foam mats since 2018, and the range has stayed the size it is because the choices a parent actually makes are small ones: how much floor, which animals, and whether the room needs an edge as well as a soft middle.
What that leaves us is room to say what each piece is. Every design here is reversible, every mat is the same four tenths of an inch, and every pen has mesh on all four sides. Where a piece has a limit, the page says so before the price.
How everyone at UANLAUO came to make the soft floor and nothing else is set out in full on that page.
Nursery notes
What the crease does in the first week, what a pen with no floor stands on, how much floor a crawler covers, and what the clock says about tummy time.
Twenty-four square feet, thirty-nine square feet, and the coffee table you were going to push back anyway: what the mat sizes mean once they are on a real floor.
It arrives folded, it lies proud of the floor for a day or two, and then it does not. What is actually happening, and what makes it quicker.
A soft-sided pen is an edge, not a room. What goes underneath it, what the federal rule calls a play yard, and why the difference matters at bedtime.
Three to five minutes, two or three times a day, then fifteen to thirty minutes daily by two months. The institute’s figures, and what they ask of the surface underneath.
Questions parents ask
Six of them. Longer answers live on the shelf pages and in the nursery notes.
Every buying button on this site opens the design you were looking at, in the size you chose, at our retail partner. That is where the payment and the delivery happen, and where the price you see is the price you pay.
The wide button at the foot opens the whole range at once, which is quicker if you are still deciding between a mat and a pen.
Measure the floor you would actually leave clear, not the room. Fifty-nine by fifty-nine inches is a corner: a sofa end with three feet to spare, and it is the size most families take. Seventy-nine by seventy-one is a room end, and it is the one to take if two children use it or the floor underneath is tile.
One design is made in both, so if you like the bears you are not choosing between the print and the size.
No. A mat is padding and a pen is a boundary, and neither is a sleep space. The federal definition of a play yard is a framed enclosure that includes a floor, and these pens have no floor of their own.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission asks parents to use a crib, a bassinet, a play yard or a bedside sleeper that meets federal requirements for sleep, and to move a baby to one of those if they fall asleep somewhere else.
A damp cloth. The printed face is a sealed skin rather than a fabric, so milk, purée and the contents of a cup sit on top instead of soaking in, and what is left after a wipe is usually the smell of the cloth.
There is no cover to strip and nothing goes in the machine. The one exception on this site is the mat that comes inside the 47-inch pen, which is cotton and does wash.
Two of the three do not: they are panels and a gate, and they stand on whatever floor is already there. One of them, the 47 by 47, is sold with a mat in the box that straps to the base with crossed velcro.
If you are buying a pen without one, put a foam mat under it rather than on the pen’s footprint alone - a pen on a hard floor is an edge without a middle.
A day or two under its own weight in a warm room. The mat is folded in the box along printed creases, and on a cold floor the fold is stiffer for longer, so it is worth opening it indoors the evening before you need it.
The creases never disappear entirely - they are where the mat folds - and after the first week they stop standing proud of the surface.
Every design, every footprint
Every design and footprint in the UANLAUO range sits behind this button, with the price from our last update against each one.
