Babies and their accessories: specifically slings and clothes

I know everyone else is still posting about Christmas, but I am done with that! Moving on! Mostly because I have a post Christmas deadline looming, and a half finished nursery staring at me every time I go in my bedroom.

I'm still kind of impressed with how much we've gotten done in the past couple of weeks, but I keep adding more things to the list, so that it never really shrinks as much as I would like for it to. Plan is for board and batten to go up this weekend (it strikes me as a little crazy to try to do this the weekend before Christmas, but I think we're going to anyway. Try, that is. We'll see what happens). I have the mobile pretty much finished, but I have to go buy a hook to hang it with before I can take pictures. We put the crib together last night, but it doesn't really merit its own post. It's just a crib. It will look nice with board and batten behind it and a mobile and whale hung near it, though. And I've got a couple of other projects coming up that I'll keep as SURPRISES for now. Everyone loves surprises, right?

At any rate, my hope is to roll out posts about a few more nursery projects in the next couple of weeks AND be able to do a big whole nursery post before there is a baby to live in it. I need to hold him in a couple of extra days and make him an Aquarius and then that will be more doable. I tend to make 9 1/2 pound babies, though, so holding him in might not be the best idea.

Anyway, so TODAY I thought I might stall some more on posting about actual projects by doing a post about baby STUFF. I know that this sort of thing is done, because it seems like every blogger in the whole world is pregnant right now, and I've seen many such posts.

Even though I already have three kids, the youngest one is seven, so I don't have too much baby stuff still lingering around from his infancy. We didn't know if there'd be a fourth, so all except the MOST SPECIAL things left long ago.

Fortunately, I held onto my Kangaroo Korner Adjustable Fleece Pouch. I walked Gus to sleep in that pouch every night for months, so I held onto it mostly for sentimental reasons. And it's very lucky I did because....they don't make them anymore! The horror! I'm not sure I could handle having a winter baby without my Kangaroo Korner Adjustable Fleece Pouch. Here's what it looks like, with a baby all snuggled up inside:

Only mine is light brown instead of white. If you don't already have a Kangaroo Korner Adjustable Fleece Pouch, then I'm really sorry. You should probably just have all your babies in the summer. Or look on ebay or something.

I also saved my Maya Wrap, but mostly just because I never got around to ebaying it. But, still, looks like they're crazy expensive new now, so this is probably a good thing.

And I saved my Ergo, too, but it was in the basement/garage of our old house, and there was this particularly rainy fall a few years back, and....it didn't fare too well. I have a new on my Amazon wish list now, though (not this color. I can't remember which color. But not this one):

Really, those three would be plenty of baby carriers. But why have plenty of baby carriers when you could have too many baby carriers? Am I right?

So when I found a Moby Wrap:

....at Goodwill, back when I was newly pregnant, for something like $4, I snatched it up. It looks brand new, in its handy carrying case, complete with instructions. Which I should probably take a look at at some point soon.

In addition to lots of things to carry the baby around in, I have lots and lots of things to dress the baby in. This despite having bought, by my calculations, precisely four items of clothing new. The rest is all hand-me-downs (from my kids, but mostly from other, closer in age, friends' kids) and from thrift stores.

So the big question is....what should the baby wear home from the hospital?! For all babies past, I bought a specific outfit for this occasion. I didn't (or at least haven't) this time....for one thing, I have SO MANY CLOTHES. For another thing, we live 5 minutes from the hospital now. I know that this makes no difference, really, but for some reason it feels weird to buy a special outfit for a 5 minute drive whereas it felt perfectly reasonable for a 25 minute drive. Anyway. Here are a few options:

This is the outfit Gus wore home, actually. So probably I shouldn't use it, because in 20 years I might get the pictures all mixed up (unless this baby comes out with a moustache or something). But it's still so cute! It has fat squirrels on it! I was also pleased to note, when I pulled it out, that it's a 3 month size, but it still fit my giant August (all 9 lb, 5 1/2 oz of him) just fine when he was 2 days old. So this baby should get to wear it at least once (unless he weighs 12 pounds. Which he'd better not).

The little brown overalls are one of the only things I bought new (onsie is from the thrift store). I really like knit overall things on babies. I wonder what he's going to keep in those little pockets?

This one looks very cozy, no? It's fleecy! It has an elephant! If the heat breaks in our car, we should go with this one. But I don't anticipate that.

This one is from Janie and Jack (by way of the thrift store), so it's FANCY! If the baby wears this one home, all the nurses will think we're fancy.

And here are two of the other things I bought new: pilot hats from Etsy. I love baby pilot hats. Especially ones with seals and owls. When babies are little, their hands don't work well enough for them to get their hats off! Especially the ones that tie! And that's another reason to have a winter baby. Along with the fleece pouch.

Okay, there you have it. Feel free to cast your vote for baby's first outfit! And next time...an actual post about doing stuff in our house!

Looking forward: I want this wallpaper!

I have a lot of nursery things that I'm almost ready to post about. Maybe, if someone hadn't put his Math Olympiad books right on top of my special scissors and double sided tape and ribbon in the buffet, so that I had to spend forever looking for them, I would even be ready for one of those posts right now. But no.

So for now I'll just stop in briefly to share what I wasted some time doing this weekend. Which is looking at wallpaper. Remember my giant fireplace?

I have long wanted a wall somewhere in the house with fabulous wallpaper. Just a little wallpaper. So I got to thinking that the wall with the fireplace on it might be perfect. If that fireplace isn't begging to be part of an accent wall....then I don't know what else it could possibly be saying. "Look at me! Look at me!" seems to pretty well sum it up.

Here's the thing about my den. It has giant brown couches in it. And right now everything in there is brown and green and red and doesn't flow well into the library with its blues and grays at all. Then my mom got a new sofa and gave us her old sofa. Only it's still brown. It's brown leather, and it's not in super terrific shape, so I'm not sure how long it will stick around, either. If I were rich, I would go out tomorrow and buy a big gray sectional, with a nice low profile, so it wouldn't cut off the flow from the library, but would still have plenty of seating for everyone. But...I'm not.

So I get all confused whenever I think about the den, because I want it to work with the brown couch now, but be able to someday morph into a room with a gray couch, and also flow well with the cooler colors in the adjacent room right now. Still with me?

Anyway, I decided I love this wallpaper, and I am trying to think if the colors in it can do what I need them to do:

Source: Sanderson

It's called Squirrel & Dove, even though I have never seen a squirrel with ears like that. Maybe that is what English squirrel ears look like. 

Certainly this will work with the brown couch, but what about bringing gray in? I can't decide if those branches are a gray-y enough brown. Because I want to paint the fireplace gray, I think. It gives me a headache to think about. I like the idea of bringing in teal and red, too, though. Because my other idea was MORE BLUE. And I am in danger of having an entirely blue house if I'm not careful. 

Also, there is the issue of the other walls. I spend a lot of time squinting at various shades of taupe on my computer screen, looking for one with just enough gray in it. 

Sigh. I don't know. Maybe I need to keep up the wallpaper hunt and find something grayer. What say you all?

And now back to the nursery! 

Kvar-FAIL: the story of a room divider

Quick review: when we first realized we were going to need a nursery (and that we didn't want to give up the guest room for it, at least not right away), we planned to hire someone to put up a wall with french doors, dividing our ginormous (29 by 13) master bedroom into two sections. Then this started to seem....expensive. More expensive than necessary. So we switched gears and decided to put up a cheaper and more temporary room divider of some sort instead.

When we last left off, Dave and I were staring helplessly at the Kvartal curtain hanging system section at Ikea, thinking that surely if we went around a corner there would be a useful (and very lengthy) explanatory poster of some sort, or maybe an actual full time Kvartal assistant to answer our many, many questions. But no. If there's one thing Ikea's short on, it's explanations. We finally gave up, figuring that when we returned sans kids everything would make itself clear.

This did not happen. We found ourselves there again, weeks later, no kids in sight or earshot, just as confounded by this mysterious "system" Ikea had come up with. As near as we could tell, the deal is that if you want to use the Kvartal panels, you are in pretty decent shape:

They fit right into the little Kvartal track, and you can slide them around, and all is well. But this is not what we wanted. For one thing, the selection of panels is a little lacking. They come in very limited colors and patterns, and all the ones that might have worked were very thin and translucent. I know anything short of a real wall isn't going to offer a whole lot of privacy, but we did want something we couldn't actually see through. Ikea also needs to replace the display Kvartal panels a little more often if they want to move those things. The ones there were all beat up and frayed and looked like they wouldn't last an hour in our house. (Is this the part where I add a disclaimer that Ikea is not compensating me for my opinions on the Kvartal system? Sorry, Ikea; you know I love you and lust after your Strandmon chair, but the Kvartal stuff needs some work, IMHO).

So. If you are not impressed with the panels and want, instead, to get some of the regular old curtains that are "compatible" with the Kvartal system....you would think "compatible" would mean there is some way to just buy the curtains and the track and some kind of....clips or something, and go hang your curtains up, right? I would. This certainly does not seem to be the case, even though we spent a lot of time in Kvartal-land, examining every Kvarcessory and trying to make it so. You do buy little packs of clips to fit into the tracks. But then you also have to buy this strip of clip-holding fabric that you take home and sew onto the backs of all of your curtains before you can use the clips.

Now. I do own a sewing machine (I don't know where it is right now, but I know there's one in the house somewhere) and I guess, in some very generous definition of the word, I "know" how to use it. But I prefer not to. Sometimes I see people on the internet make cute pillows and whatnot, and I think, "maybe I should do that sometime." And then I don't. The idea of sewing something like 18 feet of this little fabric strip thing onto the backs of curtains made me want to cry.

"I think you can do that," Dave encouraged me.

"Maybe Kristi would help me," I said doubtfully.

The end of the saga is that we finally decided the Kvartal system was too much trouble for too little payoff and that there MUST be an easier way to do things.

We left Ikea with some cheap curtain rods and hardware that we hoped to somehow rig up so that they would hang from the ceiling instead of the wall and 6 white (non Kvartal compatible) curtain panels that we intended to put on said cheap rods:

Merete curtains, $24.99 for two panels

Then we came home and thought about it for a long time and ran into a few flaws in the plan that would likely make adapting our cheap Ikea rods and hardware more trouble than it would be worth. Also, we thought to ourselves, we couldn't possibly the only people who'd ever wanted to hang some curtains from the ceiling to make a room divider.

Google and Walmart came to our rescue. Walmart's website sells exactly what we needed, which turned out to be the Verona Ceiling Mount Curtain Rod. We ordered three of them, waited for the notice that they were ready to be picked up at the closest Walmart, and we were ready to hang a room divider! (Walmart's not paying me, either. Not all of my opinions on Walmart are as positive as this one about how easy it is to get ceiling mount curtain rods from them).

Then we got to work!

First we had to decide how big to make the nursery part of the master bedroom. The final decision was more or less arbitrary, helped along a bit by outlet placement....we ended up deciding to put the curtain 10 1/2 feet from one wall. So the final dimensions are something like 17 1/2 by 13 for the master bedroom part and 10 1/2 by 13 for the nursery.

Next we made marks on the ceiling in several places to make sure the curtain would go straight across the room.

I stood on a step stool by the wall and held one end of the tape measure while Dave stood 10 1/2 feet or so into the room on a stepladder, held the other end, and made Xs in pencil. Then we moved the ladders a few feet and did it again. And again. And again. Then Dave took the first picture of me ever to appear in this blog, I believe. See? Pregnant. And yet on a stepladder. I am SO dedicated. Also, you can get a preview of the Newburg Green, albeit a cruddy, flash-illuminated one. I am very in love with it.

Then I sat on the bed with my laptop and ordered pretty lamps for the nursery and picked out fabric for curtains while Dave screwed the brackets into the ceiling with anchor screws and cursed a lot.

This was a tedious process. We had three rods, and each needed three brackets to hold it. We decided to put the middle one just behind the ones on either side, so that the middle curtain  panels could overlap the ones on the sides and not leave any gaps.

Then we put the curtains on the rods, the rods through those little loops, and we were done! The curtains are 8 feet long, and so are our ceilings, so it worked out very nicely. They're almost flush with the ceiling and they pool on the carpet just a tiny bit.

Here it is in the light of day, all finished!

There are six panels total, so we can open it up anywhere, but there's probably going to a dresser on the other side in the middle, so we'll probably mostly use this spot as the "door." It's closest to both the door to the room and to where the crib will be, so, assuming I'm growing a baby who will stay asleep for transfers to the crib, that will be convenient.

In case you're wondering why we forgot to paint the bottom half of the wall there, that's where the board and batten is going.

And, since my iphone camera has a far wider lens than my real camera for some reason, here's one more shot from it:

I'm feeling much better about the status of the nursery now. We haven't even dipped into Dave's winter break yet, and the only really BIG project left is the board and batten. There's maybe an hour or two of finishing up painting to do (I mean, not counting the painting associated with the board and batten), and everything else should be little things that can, with luck, be finished in an afternoon. I mean an afternoon each, not an afternoon for everything all together. But still! We're getting there!

Cost breakdown:
curtains: $75 for three sets of panels
brackets and rods: just under $100 for the three rods

Linking with: Hookin' Up with House of Hepworths, Transformation Thursday at The Shabby Creek Cottage, The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday, Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Chic on a Shoestring's Flaunt it Friday

Oh! Also! The LAST Christmas Decorating Post

I totally forgot!

Our house has a weird....kid? cherub? ghost? hanging out above the front door. He's actually a little bit creepy. I don't think any other house in the neighborhood has one; I'm not sure why anyone ever thought it was a great idea to put him there.

But, at any rate, there he is. And as soon as we saw him, when we first looked at the house, the kids decided he needed to wear a Santa hat for Christmas. So, on the very same day that I did not buy a fabulous white Christmas tree, we found a lovely Santa hat at the thrift store, and got our creepy doorway kid all ready for the holidays (oh, look--wings. I guess definitely a cherub):

The Other Christmas Decorating Post

In years past (most of them anyway), we have done things like going to tree farms to cut down our own tree, or we've gone places that had hayrides and cocoa and visits with Santa to complement their overpriced trees, or, at the very least, we've gone to a less elaborate tree selling place but sprung for the Noble Fir, which was crazy expensive and absolutely beautiful. 

This year (pregnant!) we went to Home Depot. Home Depot is about 7 minutes from our house, and I think we were back home within half an hour of leaving our front door. I would have bought a Noble Fir if they had them, but no. Fraser Firs as far as the eye could see. 

Our tree! We pulled it out of the big pile of trees and picked it our ourselves!

The guy trimming the trunk for us has a cowboy hat, which makes the whole thing extra festive!

I thought it would be funny if they posed in front of this sign, pretending to be really excited about the chainsaw. I was right. Note that Milo is perfectly appropriately dressed for the weather in his short sleeved shirt here. SO Christmassy. But today it was 42, so maybe we should have waited a week.

I took a picture of the sign so we'd never forget the magical night.

And here it is, all decorated and lit up. It's no Noble Fir, but it will do.

Our Christmas decorations are not exactly what you might call....mature. Also, I couldn't get a good picture of the whole Christmas zoo. This was the best I could do. We have a Christmas zoo. A couple of years ago, the kids got gift cards from Sears from one of Dave's uncles. Rather than buying clothes, which is not super exciting for kids, we opted for starting a Christmas village....and the Christmas village stuff that was left over after Christmas  was mostly from the Lemax zoo collection. Which is cool, because what says Christmas more than....a zoo?

We just added the zoo entrance this year.

Here's the petting zoo.

I don't think the Santa actually goes with the zoo, but he could visit, right? This one moves!

What else have we got? Well, these guys from Rudolph. I tucked them in on top of the Old Lady Cabinet in the dining room. There used to be more pieces, but stuff happened.

The Playmobil nativity scene. Maybe someday we'll get a grown-up one.

The Holly Jolly Santa! My brother and SIL gave this to us Christmas of 1999. They told us it would help keep us entertained if all the power went out for Y2K, but then we opened it and realized it only plugs in...no battery back up. Fortunately, if you'll recall, it turned out not to be an issue. Santa dances to Alan Jackson singing "Holly Jolly Christmas." The best feature? The "repeat endlessly" mode that the kids are fond of setting him to. He's sounding a little....tired this year. I am worried that his Christmases are numbered.

So there you have it. It's a little....sparse compared to other people's amazing mantles and entranceways and whatnot, but....pregnant! Next year I will use my nearly one year old for an excuse instead.

Dare to DIY (Deck the Halls); giant snowflakes, et. al.

Last week of the Dare to DIY link party, and I'm back with another DIY project fit for a 7 year old! I was going to do one mammoth Christmas decorating post (well, as mammoth as it could be given our less than mammoth Christmas decorations (pregnant! universal excuse for everything I don't do!)), but I seem to be  having trouble getting any sort of post written today, so I'm breaking it up.

First installment is the DIY-est of our decorating....two small projects that are making our foyer festive (a little holiday alliteration for you).

First up: giant snowflakes! I first saw a tutorial for these on my homeschool message board two years ago, I believe, and was very pleased with how impressively they turned out given how easy they were to make. I'm not going to try to explain how to make them because my poor spatial reasoning skills would make that a giant disaster. I'm going to link you to a handy tutorial from Home With the Boys  instead.

First we went off to Hobby Lobby in search of shiny silver and blue paper to  use for these. And.....we couldn't find any anywhere in the store. I'm still convinced they must have exactly what I wanted in there somewhere, if only I could have found the right aisle. But, at any rate, we wound up settling for a pack of blue construction paper and using regular old printer paper from home instead. We worked on these while we decorated the Christmas tree, and knocked out three of them that night.

Kids can do a good bit of these independently, depending on age. Ari can pretty much do the whole thing; the others needed some help with folding in a straight line, but could do the cutting and taping themselves. They're also very forgiving; no need for exact measurements or perfectly straight lines. Then we hung them up in the foyer with ribbon and scotch tape. And one of them keeps falling down, so we probably need to find a better way to hang them.

And part 2 of decking the foyer: vintage wrapping paper, finally put to use!

I found this box of vintage wrapping paper at a yard sale back when we lived in Boston, if I remember right. And I've been hauling it around the country with me ever since. It is too pretty to use just to wrap presents with, but I've never come up with another project for it. Until now! It's actually not especially revolutionary, my brilliant idea. "How about I buy some cheap frames and stick it in there?!" I thought to myself. So that is what I did. I still have a ton left, so I'll have to come up with some more incredibly innovative ideas like that next year.

Here's the box the gift wrap is in. It's DELUXE! or, more precisely, "DeLuxe"

There's a surprising amount of wrapping paper in there. Some of it is awesome, and some of it is plain green.

Here is my detailed tutorial for how to put vintage wrapping paper in frames:

1. Go to Hobby Lobby and buy cheap frames. These were 50% off (I understand that happens as often as not at Hobby Lobby), so $5 each. They might not have white frames like you really wanted, but the black ones will be fine.

2. Pick out your three favorite varieties of vintage wrapping paper and cut to the appropriate size.

3. Put in frames

4. Hang up on wall

5. There! Finished! And you did it all yourself! Reward yourself with chocolate.

This is what our foyer looks like now. But (warning: here is the sad part of this post)....try picturing it with a an awesome white Christmas tree with blue and silver vintage ornaments under those snowflakes. They had an awesome white Christmas tree for $29 at the thrift store the other day, and.....I did not buy it. I had a bad cold and did not feel up to decision making. And I would have had to carry it to the car. And I was TIRED. I sent Dave back for it the next day, but it was, of course, gone. Sigh. So my foyer is tragically incomplete. But I know another white (or silver!) tree will turn up sooner or later. I need only be patient. But not patient once I see it; then I must be ready to pounce!

Linking up with: Decor and the Dog, Maybe Matilda, Two Twenty One, and Newly Woodwards

My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Chic on a Shoestring's Flaunt It Friday

Redecorating the blog

What do we think? Eventually I'd like to de-Bloggerify and use something more flexible.....but, let's be honest, I wouldn't have a clue what to do with more flexibility right now anyway. As it is, I needed my eleven year old to help me change things around. But, yeah, much as I love my Boxy Colonial, it was kind of overwhelmingly big up there. For some reason, Blogger will let me change the color of absolutely anything except the post titles. They really want them to be blue. So, uhh, I guess that's fine with me? I like blue.