The Nursery

Yes, Easter was lovely (and rather exhausting), but more on that later. For now, the nursery...

I realized recently that though I posted pictures when we first looked at our lovely home, I have never done so since, and last month marked three years since we have moved here! I guess I always wanted to wait until it was "done," but now I realize it will always be a work in progress; I will always have a project (or few) I need to do or some furniture I need to switch around to feel complete.

So, I thought I would celebrate three years in our home by posting a few pictures of the different rooms throughout the month. I am no interior designer, but I have enjoyed trying to find budget-friendly ways to make our home beautiful and functional for our little family. It seems each January finds me scouring Better Homes and Gardens, moving furniture around, and brimming with ideas for projects that will make our home feel complete. I finally forced myself to move Emily to the nursery over the last month, so I thought that would be a good room to start with. I was kind of nervous about how that would go with the three girls in one room, but for now it's working. Though I still put Em on my bed or in the bassinet for the odd nap or if the other girls aren't yet asleep when I am putting her down. I think I'll keep up a playpen in my room for this purpose until I move the other girls to their own room down the road.

Back in the summer, I mentioned Mike and I painted the nursery. Soon afterward, we moved three-year-old Maggie out of her crib to make room for baby. I had planned on leaving Kate in the crib, but Kate had different ideas. Not to be left behind, she learned to climb out of her crib: Within hours, it had become her personal jungle gym, so there was no leaving her in it. So we found some cheap (though surprisingly sturdy), matching toddler beds (only a little over a hundred together!) and babysat Kate at bedtime for a few weeks...which turned into a few months. She was just still too little to control her compulsion to get out of bed and come out of her room when left to her own devices. Thankfully, for the past couple months, bedtime has not been such a struggle. There were some very sweet moments in having to put her to bed every night, but it was also exhausting sometimes and made it hard to rally the energy afterwards to get anything done (which is a struggle anyway).

The color yellow I picked this time I like even better than when I painted Maggie's room yellow in our apartment long ago. I love how the girls' room has come together. It's the details and the story behind them that make me happy. My mom found those cute poster pictures for a couple dollars each at Deseret Industries in Utah (similar to Goodwill, for those who aren't familiar). My wonderful sister-in-law Kathy made all the quilts, even the decorative one at the end of Emily's crib. In the past, I've had it hanging on the wall, but wall space is at a premium right now and I didn't want to unbalance the room by hanging it over just one girl's bed. I made the name banners out of scraps of the fabric line that Kathy used for the quilts, which she just happened to have a lot of. And she gave me the plates that they made when her daughter Sabrina was using a quilt made from the same fabric (they used cornstarch water to make circles of fabric stick to clear glass plates...genius, right?). The frame on the picture of Christ with children was one I had in college and the knick-knacks were made by Grandma Kay and passed to us by Grandpa Gotfredson when Mike and I were dating. The dresser is hand-me-down from a former visiting teaching companion and the crib was mine (though eventually we should probably replace it since drop-rail cribs are taboo now--too bad because we have another hand-me-down one my sister-in-law Nadine found us for Kate that matched it pretty well). The bench seat was a former coffee table just eight bucks at DI that Mike and I painted for a date-night project when Kate was a baby. I made the cushion with some cheap fabric from Walmart. And the adorable dolls were made by my fabulous high school friends Phoebe, Jessica, and Kaitlyn and sent to me when I was pregnant with Maggie. I have loved them from the start and, now more than ever, love that there are three! Oh, and the little dress? Mine as a baby.

While most all of this was done long ago before Emily was born (I think everything but the little dress on the wall--that was my most recent addition), the thing that I still need to get to is to finish Emy's name banner. I almost did it when I was pregnant, but I'm never that confident about the name beforehand. (Though I was confident enough to cut out the letters.) Maybe now that I've confessed, I'll be motivated to get that done this week...