I remembered to take some photos this morning while the sun was still on this side of the house! Want to see Pippo's room before it all gets packed up?
I really do love it. Most everything in it is thrifted, homemade, or was a gift (or some combination of the three), and I've been adding to it little by little ever since we moved in while I was pregnant with Pippo.
The rug is one of the few things we did buy brand new; we got it on sale at World Market (that's Pippo's zoo quilt spread out on top of it above, per his request). It made a big difference in his little room to put a cute rug over the beige carpeting, especially before we added the curtains (fairly recently).
The curtains (also from World Market, by way of my mother) weren't part of the plan. I was, at least in theory, keeping my eye out for the right fabric at a good price to make the ones I had pictured in my head. But then one weekend we decided the blinds weren't enough to block the light, and the morning sun was waking Pippo up before he was ready (and, notably, before we were ready). These were the curtains I had on hand, so up they went.
Again, though I love them objectively, they weren't quite what I had in mind for his room (they're darker and rather more elegant than I was imagining, for instance). But I like them in here anyway, and as my mom and I often say to each other, “they don't not go,” so they've stayed. Sometimes decorating inertia works better than others!
We sit in the rocking chair every night and read a book or two before we say our prayers and I tuck him in. I found the rocking chair at an antique store in our town, and it's one of my favorite pieces of furniture we own. (The pillow is something my mom gave me while I was in college!)
We keep his bedtime books on the little shelves on the wall next to the chair; they're spice racks from IKEA that you've probably seen used as bookshelves elsewhere as well (I'm not the clever person who thought of using them this way). I did spray paint ours blue, though, which is maybe a little clever.
I found his crib and changing table on craigslist before he was born, and sewed his crib bedding during my furious late-pregnancy nesting. Christmas Eve found me stubbornly putting on the finishing touches before Mass, hollering downstairs to my husband that we were having leftovers for dinner and no, my contractions weren't close enough together for him to worry about bringing me to the hospital.
(You may recall that he was born in the wee hours of the day after Christmas. Not, of course, that he even used his crib for the first several months. But I was not having that baby until it was done, darn it!)
(This is what it looked like with the bumper and the flannel sheet. I cleverly took a picture then!) |
I know some people worry about bumpers, but I made mine out of just a few layers of quilt batting. I felt pretty confident that it was soft enough to protect him from banging his head on the bars or getting stuck in them too easily while he was learning how to move around, but still thin enough to be breathable.
I very carefully measured the crib skirt so that it would be just the right length when the crib was at its lowest setting, and then one of the casters broke and I had to take them off. I have thus far failed to replace the caster, so now the skirt is too long. Bummer.
After I spent over a year of searching craigslist listings and thrift stores for a shelf for his room, we gave up and got one at IKEA. It does work nicely. Pippo likes that everything has its own little cubby.
In the frames (cheap ones, spray painted red) are some topographical maps I found at a thrift store here, but they're actually of areas around Quantico, Virginia, where we lived when we first got married. The Lt was using maps like these as part of his training there, so I thought that was fun.
The blue and green buckets are from the dollar bin at Target, and actually are pretty much just storing our younger-baby toys right now. (Pippo doesn't really pull them out unless he's actually playing with them, which is why this works; otherwise I'd find a place that was more out of the way.)
The other cubbies have some of his other toys and books in them (most of his books are downstairs right now, in heavy use); we also set up his little wooden nativity in this shelf during Advent. He's very good about playing with them and then lining them back up again in their little cubby. Excellent two-year-old fun.
In the basket (thrifted, with a homemade giraffe liner) are the rest of Pippo's baby blankets, most of which are handmade by generous friends and relatives.
I've always kept all his clothes in these baskets on his changing table, which has worked very well for us. One bin for tops, one for bottoms, one for pj's, etc. It's easy to keep things looking relatively neat and tidy, even if you're blindly grabbing a clean onesie while keeping your other hand on the naked squirming baby up top.
(Or, these days, if I send my toddler upstairs to grab himself a pair of socks or his blue sweater. And even when he does make a mess by pulling everything out, he can also put everything back in himself quite easily.)
When they start overflowing (hello, current shirt bin), that's usually a sign to me that there are too-small clothes in the bottom that need to be transferred to a bin in the closet.
That ridiculously cute bathrobe was a birthday gift (along with the pajamas many of you admired in this post) from his Aunt Natasha (who blogged about where she got them here). In his next room, I'll make sure he has some hooks for this sort of thing, but for now he enjoys hanging it on his changing table.
My mom made Pippo the adorable elephant bunting (in an equally adorable move, she sent the sticks with it, since she was worried we wouldn't have appropriate ones around our house. In fact, we don't!); Sukie gave him the framed animal illustrations.
Habou made the green blanket, I made the red one. Pippo likes to be tucked in with both before he goes to bed, though he usually kicks them off pretty quickly.
And this is the funny little rubber duck that he lately decided is his special bedtime friend. Nothing more snuggly than a rubber duck, right?
His name is… Dada Duck. He reads books with us, says prayers (Pippo makes the Sign of the Cross on Dada Duck before blessing himself), and gets tucked in, too.
All these beautiful handmade blankets and sweet toys, and he latches onto the little birthday-party-goody-bag duck. Typical kid move.
Some of these things will move with Pippo to his “big boy room” when the time comes, others will stay with the “nursery” (most of what we have in here could be used for a girl, too). But he's very happy and cozy in his crib still, so we're probably going to try to set things up in a pretty familiar way, at least at first, when we move.
Did I miss anything? I always enjoy hearing how people put their rooms together and where things came from, so if there's anything else that you're curious about, let me know and I'll do my best to explain!
Allison says
This room is so lovely! Our nursery is my favorite room in our house too! I was wondering about the little blanket that you made for Pippo, the monkeys with the red background, because it looks very much like what I want to do for our youngest who is getting too big for baby blankets, but I feel like is too small for big blankets. She is a rather petite 2 year old. I bought two different flannels that I was just going to sew back to back to make her a bigger blanket. Is that what you did there? And did you quilt it at all or add batting in between? Want to try to get it together for her before Christmas so would love any advice you might have.