Well, this post is about the baby room, the first of many developmental processes we will be going through as parents and humans. At first, when Erika mentioned painting the baby room, and I thought, "eeewww", imagining the hassle that comes with painting a room that already has a computer desk, a futon and a barely used ugly armchair all crammed in, no thank you! Erika stayed on my back, and we came to a compromise, which was to paste a border around the top of the room. I just looked through our 5 years of pictures, and though I enjoyed the nostalgia (you wouldn't believe all the places we've been) I didn't find one! No, I'm serious, not ONE picture of our second bedroom before its current glory...man, we must have hated the room. :-)
But seriously, I did dredge up this picture Erika took after we moved the crib in and threw out ugly. In case you're confused, we have mirrors for closet doors, so you're looking back into the room, and you can see me at the computer at the other end of the room:
But then, I guess God decided we were going to paint the room, and let us know this with a some snow melt and a hole in our roof. I'd rather He didn't do it at 2am, but there we were, bleary eyed, dragging every perishable thing we saw in reach out of there, including the futon mattress:
The bucket in the middle is 3 feet high and was half full at the end of the night. To compound things, the water traveled over our ceiling and starting spreading splotches:
So after the emergency calls at 4am, the nice Hispanic roofers and a return to a state of low humidity, I reconsidered, we should paint. We were going to have to cover up the stains at least. We decided, after a painful trip to Babys' R Us to register, that we'd do a jungle/safari theme for the baby room, and so we purchased a jungly border and chose a dark green colour for the top half of our room as well as a sky blue colour for the ceiling. Here's me priming away:
Janna, Megan and Emily all came round one Saturday afternoon to help me paint the room, we did the full two coats on the ceiling first and then the walls. Sadly, I've only got one picture of the fun we had, which doesn't show the rum and sprite either:
Erika wisely took some 'before' and 'after' pics:
Then, after letting the paint dry, we had a go with the border. We were idiots and attempted to wet and paste a border on the longest length of the room without stopping to think about it, we'd wrestled that floppy, slippery paper against the wall about half way down until we realized that we didn't get it wet enough for the rest of it! So instead of taking it off again, we simply sponged water on it, pressed and prayed. The end result looks good, we were pleased with it, but if you were to look closely, you'll see many an opportunity for little fingers to pull it away again, so I'm open to any suggestion bar duct tape:
Finally, before rearranging all of the furniture, I got a big sponge and dabbed some clouds on the ceiling. I just took this picture with a flash at night, so I may repost some nicer ones in the daylight:
What with the painting done, we put everything in its rightful place. The crib now has a cool mobile with safari animals, and also on the rug too. Next will be the myriad of nice pictures we got from people. So it's just about come together. You can see two of the quilts that had been made for the baby, and also one of the pictures (of a turtle) in the bottom right corner.
We're really pleased with the room, I never would have done any of this if it hasn't been for some water, I guess I got motivated....
ps: talking about turtles, there was one wandering about our street the other day(!) do they migrate?
