The Ikea Crib Eight Months Later: A Bit of Babyproofing

Abe's crib is the Sundvik crib from Ikea. As I've mentioned before, this selection was motivated primarily by price. The crib is $119, and I like the way it looks just fine. It has clean simple lines that fit in well with the nursery. It's not flashy or exciting, but it does its job without drawing attention to itself.

I wasn't interested in spending more on a crib for a few reasons:

1. Cribs rarely excite me, no matter how much they cost. I just....don't care that much about cribs. They aren't like chairs. I love chairs.

2. I had no idea whether Abe would actually USE his crib much at all. Ari loved the crib. Milo hated sleeping, but didn't much care where he was doing it. Gus HATED the crib with a fiery passion and slept in bed with us until he was three. So, you know, I'm pretty open minded about baby sleeping arrangements. I just want everyone to sleep; I don't care where it happens.

3. Even if babies sleep in cribs, they don't do it for very long, relatively speaking. Abe's my last baby; he and some kid from Craigslist are the only ones who are going to use this thing. I'd rather save my money for something that will stick around longer.

So those are all my reasons for buying the crib to start with.

When we put the crib together, my only concern, looking forward, was that the directions made it look like we'd pretty much need to take the whole damn thing apart again to lower the mattress down once Abe started pulling up on things. But, of course, at the time, that seemed too impossibly far off to even worry about.

But then, somehow, he got bigger. Big enough to start trying to pull up on things. So, a few weeks ago, we had to undertake the daunting task of lowering the mattress. I thought I would report back on this process to make my Ikea crib analysis complete.

Turns out it was pretty easy.

We didn't have to take the whole crib apart; we just had to take one end off and then slide the bottom that the mattress rests on out and put it back in the lower position. Like this:

When we went to this, we learned that we had brilliantly thought to store the instruction manual AND the allen wrench under the mattress so that we'd be able to find them when the time came to lower the mattress:

Our minds were so sharp back before we had a fourth kid!

We opted not to put them back under there once we lowered the mattress, by the way, lest Abe somehow figure out a way to pry up the mattress while sitting on it and pull the choking hazard tools out from under there. Better safe than sorry. (note to future self: they're in the top drawer of Abe's changing table/dresser)

We turned it on its side like so.

Unscrewed all these little things.

And put the bottom back in at the lower position (there are only two positions). This part--fitting the little things into the little thing places--was the hardest part. But not bad. I would say the whole process took the two of us 20 minutes? With a baby crawling around distracting us.

The sad part is that we had to retire the crib skirt I made to match the curtains. I was going to just use heavy duty double sided tape and tape it farther back on the mattress board...but once the board was lowered the gap between it and the side of the crib was too tight to wiggle the fabric through. I might have been able to do it had I been willing to spend more time and get more frustrated. Instead, I'm thinking of making a couple of pillows or something.

I took this picture of it all folded up to commemorate it:

So my take on the crib after eight months of use and after the arduous mattress lowering? Yep, still good with it. And I can even still reach to put Abe down when he's asleep. I was worried I'd have to just drop him the last half a foot or so. And that might wake him up. But no! My arms are just long enough!

Just in time!

(okay, I stood him up there. But this was maybe a month ago. He's pulling up on everything now)

Nursery Gallery Wall Additions and Overview

We made a couple of new additions to Abe's gallery wall the other day. And I was thinking, too, that it came together so bit by bit that it might be good to do an overview of everything that's up there now (although I am not declaring it finished. It might never end!)

New things first:

This is a patch with a river otter on it that I picked up last time we visited the Tennessee Aquarium, then taped to piece of white cardstock and stuck in the cheapest frame Ikea sells. I think I paid $3 or $4 for the patch, so some pretty cheap wall art. I like it because 1. the colors are right! 2. Abe had already visited the aquarium twice by the time he hit six months old, so it seemed like a souvenir was in order and 3. OTTER! (it's not entirely thematically appropriate, since it's a river otter and not a sea otter. But close enough).

On the right is one of Abe's seven month pictures. I have a newborn picture and a three month picture of him, and now this one (plus one of him with all his brothers).

And on the left is maybe my current favorite thing on the wall...this downloadable/printable Where the Wild Things Are quote/graphic from Olive and Birch via Etsy. I generally have mixed feelings about hanging wordy things on the wall, but actual real quotations from books I can totally get behind (here is where I was going to insert this thing about how I wish it said what it really says in the book, which is "We'll eat you up we love you so" ....then I looked at the listing again and found the place where it says "Also available in We'll Eat You Up We Love You So." Oops. So I'm stuck with the not-quite-how-it-is-in-the-book "I" version because I'm not a careful reader. Ironically.

(When I was applying to grad school, to get an advanced degree in English, I was such a not careful reader that I accidentally applied for a program that didn't even exist at one school. They let me in anyway, after calling to clarify which of their real programs I had meant to apply for).

Okay, so anyway, the way this went down was that last week East Coast Creative had a post with 12 free nursery printables. I have a nursery, and I like free things, so I picked out a couple of my favorites and sat down to print them out. But I could.not.get.them.to.print.the.right.size! It was frustrating. They kept being either too big or too small, and I had no clue why.

I gave up.

Then I scrolled down to the section where they threw in some bonus not quite free printables and followed the link to Olive and Birch on Etsy. And I found that print up there that I loved so (so much I could eat it up). I'm not sure why I was so confident that THIS would print out correctly. I guess I figured that paying $5 gave me some extra protection. Like  if it DIDN'T print out correctly, the owner of Olive and Birch would fly in from Utah to fix my printer for me, because I'd paid five dollars.

But it printed out just fine with no such intervention necessary. And now it's on the wall and it makes me happy.

And now here's the whole thing (so far):

Those numbers aren't there in real life. I put them in with MAGIC.

1. I just talked about that one!

2, 4, 5. This is where it all started! These three prints are all pictures I've taken on family trips to Cape Cod.

3. Abe's 7 month picture

6. Ari designed this sort of graphic birth announcement, with minimal help from me.

7. Gus drew this whale picture for Abe.

8. Newborn baby Abe

9. Koi print from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

10. Milo made this 3D Lego shark

11. 1st photo ever of all 4 boys (in hospital) (I talked about this first big gallery wall expansion here)

12. Abe's 3 month portrait

13. More biodiversity library prints....narwhal and seal

14. the river otter!

15. photo of jellyfish I took at the Georgia Aquarium

I love looking at this wall, and I love the mix of things. Nothing on this wall was expensive, but most of it has some sort of personal meaning. And the things that don't are awesome anyway because they're narwhals or whatever.

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The Nursery Again

I can't really leave the nursery alone.

Really, most of the recent additions have been to make the room more practical for an actual baby to live in. Like this one:

We spend a lot of time hanging out in here while Abe does stuff like this. He's a big fan of tummy time. In fact, he's taken to rolling immediately onto his tummy almost any time you put him down on his back now.

The not at all practical addition is another gallery wall expansion. This might be the last one. Or I might take it higher. Thoughts?

We added in one of his three month pics, the jelly fish from the Georgia Aquarium that I've been meaning to frame for forever, and two more little prints from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, narwhals and a seal. It's a little sad because the narwhals are clearly not in the water where they belong. But I wanted narwhals, and I couldn't find any non-beached ones. And the seal....little known fact: at one point we were 90% sure Abe was going to be named Ronan, which means little seal. That's where the inspiration for the nursery originally came from. And I still love seals, even though I didn't name my baby after them:

I bought two cheap, teal laundry baskets from Target. One of them is actually for laundry (it's over on one side of his changing table), and we keep overflow books that don't fit on the shelf in the other one. Which makes for a nice little reading corner:

(I'm really glad we wound up with that color cover on the rocker, because it's pretty much exactly the same color as spit up).

Abe likes to hold his hands together while sitting in this chair:

When you gonna grow some hair, kid?

On the other side of the room, I moved his lamp over into the corner by the window. It was driving me crazy on the other side of the crib, where it used to be. I thought about writing a post about moving the lamp awhile back, but then I didn't (I'm only kidding. I was never going to write a post about moving a lamp. It takes moving a lamp AND buying laundry baskets to get a post out of me).

And I picked up this little wicker basket at the thrift store and spray painted it aqua to hold all his stuffed sea animals. Someday he might want a teddy bear or something, and I guess we're going to have to let him have one, thematically inappropriate though it will be.

And, in final practical nursery tweaking news, I got this basket half off at Hobby Lobby to hold his rapidly expanding collection of toys:

A few future of the nursery thoughts: when we were making the nursery, I really had no idea how long it would end up staying there. Gus NEVER slept in his crib, and was in bed with us pretty much every night for three years. Ari, on the other hand, was a magic sleep baby who slept through the night super early and always seemed happiest sleeping in his crib. Milo was somewhere in the middle. He loved sleeping with us, but mostly so that he could wake up in the middle of the night and try to get us to spend two hours playing with him.

I had no idea, of course, which kind of baby Abe would be. Had he been a Gus type baby, it wouldn't really have mattered when we moved his crib out of our room, since he wouldn't have anything to do with it anyway. But he appears to be another magic sleep baby, who already rarely wakes up before morning. So, while I'm glad he's in the same room right now and I'm not in a hurry to move him, I do see it happening sooner than I would have predicted before he was born. Maybe first birthday-ish. But I don't envision completely redoing his room until he's more like 2 1/2 or 3 and can offer at least a little input, so, when he moves, it will probably be mostly a matter of recreating his nursery in the current guest room. It's actually a slightly smaller space, but is has an actual 4th wall, so that probably makes up for the space as far as furniture placement and wall hangings and such. So! That's the blog post we all have to look forward to in 9 months or so.

3D Lego Art for the Ever Expanding Nursery Gallery Wall

Taking a break from Easter decorating while some paint dries to bring you the latest addition to Abe's gallery wall. Remember how I said that Milo was the only brother who hadn't contributed anything to it? We made quick work of remedying that situation.

One of the kids got a Lego mosaic kit for Christmas a few years ago. It was a big hit for awhile, but it hadn't seen much use lately...in fact, I was the only one who firmly remembered its existence. I suggested that Milo pull that out and make something for the wall, thinking it would be pretty easy to mount and frame it.

I hope that this post doesn't make anyone too excited about the Lego mosaic kit, because apparently they don't make it anymore, and getting ahold of one might set you back $114 or so:

Source: ToyWiz.com

We didn't pay that much. 

So as you can see from the box, there are a couple of ocean animals that one can make with one's Lego mosaic set. Milo decided on the shark. We had long since lost the directions, but we were able to find them on the Lego website and download them.

I know this post's usefulness is limited by the fact that they don't make Lego mosaic anymore, but pretty much all the kit is is a bunch of 1by1 pieces in various colors (there are a few specialty pieces, too), a clear baseplate, and instructions. It would be pretty easy to either download the instructions and replicate the results or to make your own design.

Milo set to work in his room and came down not long after with his completed creation:

On that Friday night thrift store trip where I bought many bunnies, I picked up a cheap gray frame that I thought would work well to spray paint and use for the shark. For the background, I used a piece of cardstock left over from Abe's mobile.  Then I picked up some white spray paint at Hobby Lobby the next day, and I was ready to go:

I ran into some trouble with the spray painting. The frame was some kind of cloth-like material, and it was really hard to get good coverage on it. There was one corner that, weirdly, was absolutely impossible to make white--the gray bled through no matter how many times I sprayed it. I think the lesson here is "when in doubt, use primer." Once the spray paint dried and it still looked iffy, Dave went over it with some white latex paint and a brush. 

I traced around the cardstock and cut it out to fit the cardboard back from the frame:

Then I attached it with double sided tape.

I used the heavy duty double sided tape to attach the Lego plate. I realized when I started doing this that I was limited in where I could put the tape since the base plate was clear. But it all worked out:

And then I used the same tape to attach the frame to the wall! This is my new favorite thing. It was so incredibly fast and easy, and it hasn't fallen down yet! 

Here's the gallery wall with its newest addition (I've finally departed from the Ribba frames, and I think it works okay. As long as they're all white and rectangular):

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Gallery Walls and Sea Urchins: Tweaking the Nursery

Update 2/25: My post about where to find bird and botanical images online was surprisingly popular, so I thought I'd make my new discovery about where to find lots more public domain images to print a little more prominent in this post. If you're just looking for the source for the images, scroll down until you see the fish print. But feel free to stick around and read about the rest of the gallery wall, too :)

I only made it a month after my big Last Nursery Post post (the whale) before doing another one. But, you see, this wall was looking a little sparse:

AND I had some new things that I really wanted to find a place for in there. I thought about doing another grouping on the other side of the dresser, but in the end I opted for a sort of free form gallery wall that can keep expanding.

Remember the mountain of Ribba frames I bought just a couple of weeks ago?

I thought we'd never run out.

But we're already out. My friend Kristi really wants this jellyfish from the Georgia Aquarium:

....to live in the nursery. And, being a good friend who values her opinions, I dutifully ordered an enlargement of it and planned to hang it up. Until I ran out of frames. So it will have to wait for the next Ikea trip. Because once you use that many white Ribba frames in one room, you kind of have to keep going. Or at least I feel like I do.

So I know that what you're supposed to do when you make a gallery wall is a complicated maneuver involving outlining all the frames on paper and then hanging the paper on the wall and all that. I thought we could be far more casual than that. And we could, but it involved a lot more holes in the wall than there really needed to be had we gone the frame outlines on paper route. So I recommend doing it that way. It turns out.

I did at least lay the frames out on the floor first to come up with an arrangement I liked:

(I realized I had the camera on manual focus after I took a whole bunch of pictures. Like this one. By the time I realized it, the pictures were already on the wall, so I couldn't retake this one). Those two books are supposed to represent two of the pictures that were already on the wall.

And here they are on the wall:

The idea is we can keep going and fill in over to the rocking chair (and maybe up and down, too, depending on how things go), but I'm liking the sort of random, not symmetricalness of it for now, too.

Taking a closer up look at the pictures:

Newborn baby Abe!

I said I needed this for the nursery, and I meant it. There's a crab I want, too. And probably lots more. This fish is from The Biodiversity Heritage Library, where you can find many thousands of beautiful images from scientific literature, all of which is in the public domain and free for you to download and print out. They even have a Flickr page where they round up the images for you so you don't have to dig through all the texts. I talk more about it and give some examples in this post.  Oh, btw, I did some reading over at The Graphics Fairy about the best way to print images for framing, and, based on the advice there, I printed this on photo paper and with the best quality printer settings. It turned out really nicely:

Abe with his big brothers:

Gus drew this whale for his baby brother:

And Ari (with some help from me) made this sign:

And Milo's a complete jerk who didn't make ANYTHING for Abe's gallery wall. I'm just kidding. Milo's a very nice kid who likes Abe a lot. There's still more room in the gallery wall!

A couple of weeks ago it seems like everyone in the whole world made a subway art type sign for a nursery. Then they all disappeared as mysteriously as they came. But while all that was still going on, Ari and I got inspired and made this. Here are instructions on how to make one yourself:

1. Find an eleven year old
2. Sit at one computer looking for fonts that you like and e-mail them to the eleven year old while he sits at another computer and makes your sign in MS Paint. Probably you shouldn't really use MS Paint. I hear it's pretty sucky. But that's what Ari did.

In other words, we didn't really know what we were doing, and we totally made it up as we went along. But notice that the letters for his name have little waves across the bottom? Fun! Here's where I found that, in case you need ocean letters, too.

A couple of other little nursery additions:

We had a Target gift card, and we had to buy something fun with it to go along with all the practical stuff we were getting. So we picked up this (Nate Berkus? I think) gold sea urchin. There used to be an Alcatraz snow globe there, the sharper eyed among you might remember. It....had an accident.

And my mom found this little whale step stool at the thrift store. Perfect for in here, isn't it?

We keep the monitor on it because Abe's too little to need a step stool to reach stuff right now.

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A Blue, Orange, and Gray, Not Overwhelmingly Sea Creature-y Nursery: The Reveal

This nursery has a theme. I know that I'm supposed to be all, "no way. I'M a grown-up, and I'm going to spend plenty of time in this room, too, and the sooner my kid learns that the world doesn't owe him a whimsical bedroom, the better off he'll be." But I am a grown-up who appreciates themes. Seriously, I'm about five minutes away from permanently recreating Miss Havisham's wedding feast in my dining room. I did try to keep the theme somewhat....restrained, however. I am very mature like that.

We first found out we'd be needing a nursery at nearly exactly the same time we moved into this house. Sadly, pretty much the only thing on our wish list that the Boxy Colonial lacked was a fifth bedroom. Milo and Gus are content to share a room for the moment, but the fourth bedroom was being used for a guest room/office, and we weren't ready to give that up just yet.  So, ultimately, the solution we landed on was dividing our ginormous master bedroom in two and using half of it for a nursery for the time being. Eventually the baby will likely move into the guest room, and either we'll be guest room-less or we'll be ready to finish the basement by then.

I've had a pinterest board with nursery ideas for quite awhile, and a lot of the plans I made way back then actually came to fruition in some form or another. You can read about my nursery musings back in October here to see how things have evolved. But we didn't start actually DOING stuff until Thanksgiving. Which means we went from this:

Pretty much a storage room for stuff we didn't know what else to do with....to a finished nursery in about seven weeks. We seem to work well with a deadline. And without a newborn. We'll see how things go from here on out. More slowly. Is my guess.

A few notes before I share the overabundance of photos with you.

*I feel like I should say meta things about what aesthetic I was going for or whatever. But I have no such things to say. I wanted the ocean/sea creatures theme to be there, but not overwhelming. I wanted something that worked with the other half of the room, which is our bedroom and not as whale-heavy, but I still wanted whimsical and fun for the nursery side.

*I am always a little surprised at how rooms come together when I start them from scratch. They seem to wind up more modern and streamlined than I would expect myself to make them.

*This room was a beast to photograph. It finally occurred to me that this is probably mostly because the paint color is so dark. So my method was to take WAY too many pictures, at different times of day, with different lenses, then spend forever sorting through them to find the least awful ones....and hope for the best.

*Nurseries are so much fun. I think I need four more babies just so I can keep decorating nurseries. Just kidding, Dave. No more babies. I'm sure a toddler room will be almost as fun to decorate. Sigh.

So on with the tour! I'll note where all this stuff came from and give links to individual projects (there are a LOT of projects) as I go along.

Here's a view looking straight in from the master bedroom side of the room. Dave and I made the no-sew curtains with gray and orange see saw fabric from Carousel Designs. I talk about making them here. The paint that made the room so much trouble to photograph, but which I love anyway, is Benjamin Moore's Newburg Green.

The bookcase was a garage sale find many years ago. We gave it a fresh coat of paint for its new life in the nursery and covered a piece of cardboard cut to fit the back with squid fabric from Spoonflower. Read about the bookcase project here. The lamp is from Target (ordered online). The prints above the bookcase are from Studio Tuesday via Etsy.

I found the fish at TJ Maxx. He's supposed to hold a votive candle, but open flames and babies don't really mix, so he'll just sit around looking cute instead.

The stuffed seal is from Ikea. The kids bought me the Alcatraz snowglobe when they (and Dave) went to California last spring and left me home to paint the kitchen cabinets in the old house. Gus thinks it's too scary for the baby, but I think he'll be okay.

Moving right along...it's the next wall! Along with the corner. The rocker is a Poang rocker from Ikea. The dresser was Dave's dad's, then Dave's, and then has been in all of our kids' nurseries or bedrooms. We repainted it and gave it some fancy new whale drawer pulls from D. Lawless Hardware. I talk more about that here.

I can't remember where I got the paper lanterns. Uhh....I googled "paper lanterns" and ordered them from one of the online stores that popped up. Originally, these were supposed to go over the changing table. But then I had to move the mobile there so that nothing would cover up our friend the whale, so we put these here instead.

I found the "Seals & Sea Lions" book at the thrift store. The Nantucket book is from the real Nantucket, where Dave and I went on our honeymoon. Gus bought the plush sea lion for me/the baby for Christmas (aww!). The starfish were at TJ Maxx. The lamp is from Target; it used to be in Milo's room at our old house. And the diver's mask was a happy find at Hobby Lobby. I kind of love it. And it was half off.

The photos (in Ikea Ribba frames) are ones I've taken over the years on our family trips to Cape Cod. More about them and better views of them here.

Gus' sea lion again. Aww!

Continuing on....here's the room divider curtain. The curtains are from Ikea, with ceiling mount curtain rods from Wal-mart. More about how we did that here. And the dresser started out ugly. Read about how we made it prettier (and added the legs to it) here.

I made the mobile and talked about how I did it here.

The hardest part to photograph, because that whale wants to blend right into the wall, particularly once the camera is finished dealing with all the white board and batten. Anyway, it's the last wall of the nursery! The crib is the Sundvik crib from Ikea. The lamp is the Stella Floor Lamp, on sale from Urban Outfitters (there's no overhead light in this half of the room, hence the three lamps). You can't tell, but the crib sheet is very soft. It is from Target's website.

DIY projects on this wall include the no-sew crib skirt to match the curtains, which I talk about here, the board and batten, which I talk about at great length here, and the whale, which there is not yet a separate post about, but that's coming up. Her name is Martha.

The pillow is from Ikea. Oh, and you can kind of see how nice and soft the crib sheet is. If it would only get below 70, it would be very cozy for the baby to sleep on.

What the whale actually looks like. It was the last thing we did in here (less than a week before my due date! Cutting it close!), so it's the thing I'm currently the most in love with. I'll write up a separate post about how we made it either later this week or, if I have a baby soon, then....just....later and tell you how we made her. It was easier and less fraught with worry and trouble than I expected.

I don't want to stop writing about the nursery, but I think I'm all finished now. I still can't quite believe it all actually came together before the baby was born. And I don't know quite what to do with myself now that it's finished. I really can think of LOTS of things to do with myself (and my house), but none of them seem quite as fun or gratifying right now as making, say, a big wooden whale.

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