Ordered!

I know, I know. I’m a bad momma. I haven’t gotten Gray a baby book yet. But, it’s not my fault. I’ve been looking honest. I just hadn’t found one that I loved. Well, that all changed when I noticed Anthro had a cute boy/girl baby book for around 20 clams. Score.

* I’ve been keeping a journal of his day-to-day activities and milestones in Google Docs so I wouldn’t forget anything along the way. Go me!

Gray’s 3 month b-day is just days away, so I am already formulating how I want to take his 3 month photos. This photo shoot will be a tad bigger than him sitting in his big brown chair. I don’t know how much bigger, but bigger. I know I shouldn’t have, but I just bought the cutest, most adorable, totally drool worthy little hat for his upcoming photo shoot. It’s a Giraffe hat.

{Look this baby is chunky just like my little dude.}

I bought this hat from my favorite online marketplace…Etsy! This Thanksgiving, right after I thank God for my beautiful son, and awesome husband, I’m thanking him for Etsy.

Back to where I got the hat from. I bought this hat from the Bethany’s 5 Etsy shop. You tell her the size and she crochets it. I can’t wait to share the photos from this shoot with ya’ll. Ahhhh! I’m so excited.

Update (November 8th, 2010)

Welcome Spearmint Baby Readers! Feel free to look around, and bookmark me if you like what you see.

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Update (October 22, 2010)

I wrote this post a while back, and figured I would submit this post for the “Show Us Your Life – Children’s Rooms” week on Kelly’s Korner instead of rewriting it.  Enjoy!

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All Done!  The nursery that is.  The baby….well that doesn’t seem to have an end in sight.

But back to the nursery.  Over the past few months, pretty much the past 8 months, I have been working my little tushy off trying to make the perfect resting spot for the bambino, and I have to say I am quite proud of myself.  I love good design, but always feel that I fall short when it comes to bringing a room to it’s full potential.  Although, if I had the money, there are a few things that I would have done different.  I think that this is my favorite room in our house.  Even the dogs like hanging out in here.

This is what the room looked like when Derek 1st purchased the house.  Yowza!  Believe it or not it was a 6 year old little boy’s room.  Yeah….me too.

Then our good friend Amy moved in and the room blossomed into this….

After Amy moved out we converted the room into a guest room/crafting area that I barely have photos of.  This is all I could find.

Guess I forgot to take pics.  Oh well.  Too late now.

Then just before Christmas we found out that we were expecting, and demo (a.k.a. – wallpaper removal) began.

After the demo portion of the room revamp was done we needed to decide on what style we wanted the room to take on.  We really like the bright whites and clean fresh look of the MOD style.  So that’s what we went with.

First we found the bedding.  I am a huge fan of Dwell Studio, and although they have a great selection at Target I fell deeply in luv with another one of their designs that unfortunately is NOT for sale at the bullseye retailer.  So my big splurge on the nursery was the crib bedding.  Hey, you can’t stop true love.

Once the bedding was decided upon I knew exactly what mobile I just had to have.  This mobile is a Flensted mobile that I order from Amazon.  I just couldn’t resist those sweet sheep.

For his changing table we didn’t want to go with the typical changing table for two reasons (1) what do you do with a changing table once the kid grows up?  stick it in the attic?  and (2) we already had a perfectly good piece of furniture that could double as a changing table and provided hidden storage….score!

So in effort to reduce costs and not having to find a new location for the Pottery Barn Channing Buffet we had in the nursery prior to it becoming the nursery; we converted the buffet into a sleek and stylish changing table.  However, we may no longer want to serve food from this buffet after it serving up poop and pee for the next 2 years.

Over the changing table Derek hung some inexpensive floating white shelves we picked up on the cheap at Target.  I spray painted some old frames we had just lying around and filled them with some homemade artwork.  Some of the artwork I created in Photoshop, and the other is just cute craft paper I already owned.

See that owl?  Precious right?  My friend Sarah found it on Etsy.  It matches the room perfectly.  Okay, so there is one piece of art over the changing table that I didn’t make, and that’s the silhouette of the German Shepherd.  I found this awesome piece of art at the Mod Dog Etsy shop.  We love GSD’s around here.  Bet you would have never guessed that.  For that reason, I thought it would only make sense to start the G-man out on the right paw foot.

As for the wooden toys on the shelves, I scored the hippo and fawn natural wood teethers at the Little Alouette Etsy shop and can’t wait for Grayson to sink his gums into them.  And the elephant, giraffe, and sheep … well I picked them up from Oompa.  Stealing an idea from the kiddos at Young House Love I intend to mount the little guys hospital bracelet in the  currently empty frame sporting the bright blue background.

All of the little man’s pacifiers seem to all be beautiful blues, greens, and whites, so I thought it would be fun to make them part of the room’s decor.  I got this idea from my friend Sarah.  She did something like this at a shower she threw for me a few months back.  PLUS!….it provides easy access to a key baby soothing tool.  I used a glass canister that we owned from our wedding.  We used it to hold candy at our sweet (pardon the pun) candy bar.

See that shadow box?  Pottery Barn Outlet…thank you very much.  That’s a pillow case inside.  Clever, I know.  I just printed out a G in one of my favorite fonts….American Typewriter, and added one of our baby shower invites.  Over time I plan to add keepsakes from our little guy’s life.  Maybe a cap from the hospital, foot prints, a picture of him and his puppies?  Who knows.

The robots are my creation.  I know they aren’t anything special, but they help complete the corner.  I didn’t want the walls to be too busy, and I think the simplicity of the white frames and gray robots give the walls that something extra.

For the closet, we have the usual clothes and storage, but on the middle shelf I have a basket for bibs and burp cloths for easy access.  Next to that I placed a few of his swaddling blankets and hats.  Just in case I need something on the fly.  This way I don’t have to go digging through the huge drawer of blankets and other misc items when I have a screaming kid on my hands.  See that blue bucket on the floor of the closet?  That’s his hamper.  I wanted something easily cleanable.  You know baby poop and barf….it gets all over everything.  Yuck!  I also wanted it to have a bit of style too.  BTW…it’s bigger than it looks.

As for the flooring in the room, we went with FLOR tiles.  We hunted around for quite some time trying to find something affordable yet stylish.  We hit up Home Depot, Lowe’s, Pottery Barn Outlet, and a few other places.  Not to mention I dug around on Overstock.com and other online retailers, but alas nothing.  Finally, I took a peek at FLOR.com.  Believe it or not, FLOR has some quite affordable carpets.  We decided to go with the Cream :: Easy As Pie.  I couldn’t love it more.  A great thing about modular flooring is that if one tile gets stained beyond repair you can just order one new tile and forgo the cost of replacing the entire carpet.  And we all know how messy kids, and dogs can be.

So what do ya’ll think?  I’m also hoping that if the next one is a girl I can just modify the design a smidge.  Any suggestions on what we should add to the shadow box?  Did I do okay?

I want to be like the big dogs on the blog block, so I thought I too would add me a little source/cost list of our room makeover.

Crib :: gift from my parents (Walmart.com)
Soy bean mattress :: gift from Derek’s parents (Walmart.com)
Window treatments :: gift from Derek’s parents (Target)
Shadow box :: already owned (Pottery Barn Outlet)
Artwork :: I whipped this up in Photoshop & owned the paper
Changing table :: already owned (Pottery Barn Outlet)
Carpet tiles :: $105 (FLOR.com)
Chest of drawers :: $100 (Target)
Glider :: $75 – (Babies-R-Us) * remainder paid for by gift cards/coupon*
Floor lamp :: $99 (Target.com)
Shelving :: $10 each (Target)
Dog silhouette art :: $20 (Mod Dog Etsy shop)
Crib bedding :: $320 (Fawn & Forrest) * free crib sheet and weekend tote w/ purchase*
Table lamp :: $10 (Target)
Large green bins :: $15 each (Target)
Small green bin :: $10 (Target)
Mobile :: $33 (Amazon.com)
No VOC Paint :: $40 (Sherwin Williams)

If there is something that I didn’t list and you want to know where I got it from just leave me a comment, and I’ll let you know.

Can you say “Cutest Burp Clothes Ever”?

One day while trolling Etsy I came across these precious burp clothes.  I found them at the Lilacs & Lollipops Etsy Shop.   These precious little things, that one day will be covered in spit-up, are made with premium pre-folded cloth diapers and Amy Butler fabric.

I may not even pass the burping duties off to Derek just so I can wear one of these babies on my shoulder.  Maybe.

We’ve had a few showers and received more than our fair share of baby clothes.  Now the question is what to do with all them dang baby clothes.  Hang them up of course!  Well not all the clothes.  The closet is way too small for that.  But we did want to optimize the space we do have, so I asked my handy husband to add a second hanging bar and shelf to our too tiny closet.  He was more than happy to do so.  Or at least he faked it well.

The closet already had a high hanging bar and shelf, but I wanted a bit more hanging real estate so I asked Derek to add a lower bar and shelf.  He knocked that out in 30 minutes flat.

On the floor of the closet is Grayson’s hamper.  I decided to forgo the traditional looking hamper and use a colorful plastic tub that I picked up on the cheap at my favorite store….Target…of course!  I figured why not get something that fits the style of the room and is easy to wipe down.  Kids spit-up and barf on everything!  Or so I hear.

I covered the shelves with some cute, but boyish, contact paper and painted an accent color in the closet.  I thought by painting this random bar of wood (I have no clue why it’s in the closet…it does absolutely nothing) I could tie the closet to the room a bit more.  So, I took the same color I painted the room, Online Grey, and painted this wooden accent bar within the closet.  Kinda makes it PoP, don’t ya think?

I purchased an inexpensive fabric box at Target to house the multitude of bibs and burp cloths we collected from our recent showers.  And on the shelf next to the box I have a stack of swaddling blankets, and caps for the baby to make sure he is always nice and toasty.  On the top shelf, I have two empty Rubbermaid tubs just waiting to be filled.  It’s nice to have storage ready and waiting for future “junk”.  Kids always bring about extra junk.  Oh yeah,  I am currently storing our stash of diapers up there too.

One of our shower gifts were these cute clothes dividers.

I thought about looking into something like this for his closet.  Since at the beginning, you have a variety of sizes in clothing.  Someone beat me to it.  And the dividers she gave me are just too cute.  Now all of Gray’s hanging clothes can be organized in his closet by age/size.  I’m hoping this will save me time in the “searching for something in his current size” department.

Has anyone else tried this organization method with their kids clothes?  How did it work out?

I ordered Grayson’s crib bedding from a cute little shop called Fawn & Forest.  This shop carries everything from baby furniture, to crib bedding, and toys galore.  It’s very hip and stylish.

When I ordered his bedding, F&F was having a 20% off Memorial Day sale and they were giving away a free crib sheet when you purchased a Dwell Studio bedding collection.  My order qualified for free shipping and they didn’t charge me tax, so I thought at that point I was doing pretty good when it came to discounts & free stuff.

Nope.

I did better.

When you order from F&F they send the order directly to the manufacture (in this case…Dwell Studio) for shipping.  When my order arrived at my home I found and little something extra in the box I wasn’t expecting.  Check out this adorable, and the best part FREE bag Dwell Studio sent me!

I guess I lucked out and Dwell Studio was giving away free weekend totes with purchase.  S C O R E !

I was totally thrilled a first, but then remembered that I was having a boy.  Bummer.  Then I remembered that I’m a girl.  Yippee!!!!  This cute little paper doll weekend bag has all sorts of pockets on the inside and appears to be quite roomy to boot.  That’s when I decided that this little guy should be my hospital bag.  How perfect!  Right?

No sense in having a drab old bag with me on one of the most exciting days of my life.

I caved!  I decided to go with the comfy chair in the nursery over the stylish one.  One of the biggest reasons I was leaning toward the stylish chair is that it was cheaper.  Try $200 buck cheaper.  I finally decided that since I will be nursing….a lot, I really WILL need a cushy place to crash during those fun 3am feedings.

We were able to save a little dough on the chair by using a 20% off coupon, 3 gift cards, a $100 bill we received as a shower gift, and chunk of change my folks pitched in.  In all, Derek and I ended up only spending about $70 bucks on this cushion-y concoction of a chair. I’ve never used so many different forms of payment before.  It was a tad bit embarrassing. Thankfully there was no one in line behind us.  Our new motto is…”anyway to save a buck”.

Did I mention you just melt into this chair?  Yep, you melt…like a gooey tab of butter sitting on top of piping hot mashed potatoes.