Our Musical Nursery

Baby X is due in less than 8 weeks! People keep saying to me, "Wow, coming up fast!" To which my response is usually, "Not fast enough for me!" Mostly because I'm very excited to meet our newest munchkin. (Also because pregnancy sucks.)

James and I have had some serious back-and-forth debates about baby X's room. The biggest question mark has been his bed. Joel slept in our room in a pack & play for his first four months or so before transitioning to his crib in the nursery. I fully anticipate doing similarly with baby X, except that there is no crib waiting in the nursery for him.

Joel will be almost 18 months old when X comes. At the moment, Joel is nowhere close to being ready to transition out of his crib. Meaning that baby X won't be able have the crib for an undetermined period of time.

James and I debated maybe just getting a second crib. The one that we have, which we love, can become a toddler bed, and eventually serve as parts for an adult size bed as well. But this didn't seem to be the right solution for our future plans. So baby X gets to stay in the pack & play, whether in our room or his own, until Joel is ready to move to a big boy bed. Then baby X will inherit Joel's crib.

I decided to set up the nursery with the pack & play there, even though it will be moving into our room when the baby actually comes. This nursery is not as elaborate as what we put together in Utah for Joel, but the little details please me greatly nonetheless.

Baby X's nursery is music themed. While it's mostly just the basics in place, there are some fun touches that we have included:

Curtains

Thanks are due once again to my awesome mother, who created these curtains for baby X. From a distance, it's hard to tell, but up close, the fabric pops with colorful music notes! Super fun.

James and I are in love with this clock! It's not actually as hard to read the time as I feared it would be when we ordered it. It's beautiful, and we love the personal touch. :) You should know that we had a great debate over whether to use the baby's full name on the clock. But we already refer to him almost exclusively by the short version (he is baby X, after all, not baby A), so that's what went on the clock.

Last but not least is a little design of my own which I painted above the dresser. While it's not perfect, I am still very happy with how it turned out. Can you determine what the song is?

The only thing left to be added is to bring up my armchair from the living room, which will once again be a comfy spot for me and the baby to nurse. We're leaving it downstairs for a couple more weeks.

All in all, I am feeling much more prepared for baby X's arrival!

Holley House tour!

As I have mentioned before, I really enjoy unpacking. I have found that I am fairly unusual in this regard. There is something very satisfying, for me, in organizing and finding the new "homes" for all our belongings. In all of my past moves, I have never taken very long to unpack and get everything set up, and I didn't really expect this move to be very different.

That said, about three days into unpacking, James and I had gotten all the necessities squared away, and there was definitely a "hump" feeling--nothing else needed to be unpacked, and it would have been very, very easy to delay dealing with the rest. It certainly didn't help that the Little Monster sooooo enjoyed putting things back into the boxes as we tried to get everything out. It was at that point that I gave myself a deadline: every box to be unpacked by Saturday. Otherwise, I fully expected that we'd be moving some of the same, unpacked boxes three years from now when James graduates.

We did it! We weren't quite finished by Saturday, because we still had to hang some of the artwork around the house. And then I was just a slacker about taking photos of everything. But, at last, I get to present to you, the Holley House at Stoney Drive.

Exterior at sunset

Front door + little greeters

When you walk in our front door, you can go one of three directions. If you turn to the left, you will enter our comfy living room:

Living room (view from the front door)

TV in the living room, on the interior wall

Mantle (I love actually having a mantle for the first time in my life)

Living room (view from the kitchen)

Upon entering, if you turn to the right, you will enter our cute little sitting room. The previous owner used it as a formal dining room, but I am enjoying my little "formal" area very much. I would say this my second-favorite room in the house.

Sitting room (view from the front entryway)

Sitting room

If you proceed straight in from the front door, you will traverse a little hallway, with stairs to the right, and a half-bath to the left. You will then enter our kitchen!

Kitchen (view from the living room)

That doorway straight ahead leads into our garage. PS: Parking in a narrow one-car garage can be a little scary.

Just outside of the sliding glass door in the kitchen is our little covered porch, which we LOVE. It leads into the backyard.

View of the backyard from the porch

Our backyard

Incidentally, James and I have decided not to build a fence, which was our original plan. (The fence you can see in the pictures is actually our next-door neighbors'. Our yard is not fenced.) However, given the expense involved, and the fact that fences are actually really unpopular in our neighborhood, we reconsidered. Fortunately, Shadow doesn't tend to wander, and he minds well. Our children will be so young while we are here, that I don't really envision them playing outdoors unsupervised, which would be another reason to have one. It's a bit of a pain not being able to let Shadow out unsupervised, but it's working okay so far, so we're going with it for now.

Now, the upstairs!

Stairwell

At the top of our stairs is a small landing. Straight ahead is our laundry closet. To the right is Baby X's room, which shall remain unphotographed until I figure out what I'm doing with it. :P To the left is Joel's room!

Admittedly, we miss the ninja chibis very much. However, Joel still has a strong ninja theme going in his bedroom. It's a good-sized room, too, which is nice. We only decided to separate the boys' rooms because we have the space in this house, and might as well.

Down the hall from the boys' rooms is our guest bedroom. It's a bit full with all the furniture, but it works great as a guestroom.

So...if any of y'all want to come stay...you're invited!!!

If you go back down the hall, you'll pass the second bathroom (already known, in my mind, as the boys' bathroom). It is what I consider to be a standard bathroom.

Boys' bathroom

To be compared with our lovely master bathroom:

View from our bedroom

Dual sinks! This is a favorite feature of James'

MY GLORIOUS TUB

Huge walk-in closet, which you get to through the bathroom, which I find a little odd.

Re: the tub. So, I don't normally take many baths, EXCEPT when pregnant. Especially toward the end, my back just kills me, and hot baths really help. My parents have a jetted tub that I made frequent use of during my pregnancy with Joel. Knowing I would not longer have access to theirs, I was really hoping we could find a house with a nice big tub. (Our house in Orem had a standard tub: see the boys' bathroom for reference.) I am SO HAPPY with our tub! I have already used it a couple of times, and it's wonderful.

And, last but not least, our master bedroom. Easily my favorite room in the house.

View from the hallway

Our bedroom has taken over as our Taekwondo shrine, and it makes me pretty happy:

We got new sword racks so we didn't have to pound a gazillion holes into the wall. With 8 swords apiece on the wall, almost all of our swords are hung. ;)

That's about it! We are thoroughly enjoying our new home. It certainly has little quirks. But overall, it's feeling very comfortable for us. It's nice to feel as though we are settling in. It lets us start really figuring out our new life here in Durham!

Check!

Our Ninja Nursery

Early in our pregnancy, James and I went out to dinner, and the wait time was 40 minutes or more, so we wandered down to Babies R Us to idle away the time. It was amusing; we scoped out cribs and rocking chairs and enjoyed the giddiness of prospective parenthood. At one point, we walked along looking at the bedding sets for cribs. James commented that all the little boy stuff seemed to either be cutesy animals or sports, neither of which he particularly cared for.

Some time later, when we began discussing what we wanted to do with Baby J's room, we talked about some different color schemes we could go with, but we kept feeling dissatisfied with our options. Footballs and whatnot were definitely out. I was thinking that I could resign myself to puppy dogs, but James was not satisfied with this, and I definitely was craving something a little more...unique. And through the course of our brainstorming, we found it.

Ninjas.

We began in January with painting the room. We had settled on red and black, but I feared that if the entire room was painted these colors, it would be overwhelming. So we decided to paint the top half of the room red, leave the bottom half the tan it was already, with a thick black stripe through the middle.

Getting started (the view from the door)

Getting started (the view of the door)

First coat of red

Now for the black stripe

We were anxious pulling the tape off, but it looked great! This picture doesn't do it justice.

It was amazing to me how much the color added warmth to the room. However, even though I wanted to hang out in the room all the time, it wasn't very comfortable with the uncovered window. (I don't like feeling like I'm in a fishbowl!) So next I approached my mother about making some curtains. (My mother is a curtain-making wizard.)

Turns out, Mom had already found some ninja-themed fabric online. She'd been hoping to find something less expensive, but nothing had turned up, and this particular fabric was just too perfect to pass up. In short order, the window was measured, the fabric purchased, the design decided, and Mom set to work. A few days later, this joyousness joined us:

Isn't this fabric perfect?

 
One of the most important parts of the nursery for me was a chair. Seeing as how I'm going to spend a lot of my time nursing, I wanted to create a comfortable space in the baby's room. I think I tried out every chair at RC Willey looking for "the one." You have to understand, because I'm short, a lot of chairs aren't that well suited for me--you know, I wanted to be able to have my feet touch the ground, which is sometimes a challenge! But I did find a chair that I loved (and it was on clearance, even better!) and though I was worried (rightfully) about the color clashing, I could not deny that this was the right chair for me. So we brought it home.

Fortunately, some of the color issue was mediated by the arrival of our next addition:

There is just something about having a crib in the room that really makes it start to feel like a nursery. Our beautiful crib came as a gift from James's mother, for which we are incredibly grateful!

Next came a purchase of our own, to match the crib:

The dresser, having been shipped from Amazon, was somewhat of an adventure to put together. LOTS of pieces. But it came together perfectly, and we love it!

The next addition (one of my top favorites!) came from Patrick & Shaylee, our brother- and sister-in-law, as a baby shower gift. Could not be more perfect for our ninja nursery!

But the best part of all came this week. A few months ago, I asked my dear friend Ashley Stubbs, an incredible artist, if she would be willing to create ninja "chibis" on the walls of our nursery. To my delight, she took on the project with great enthusiasm! On Wednesday she came over and drew the ninjas on the walls, and today we undertook the painting of them.

The fabulous Ashley Stubbs!

And here you can see the finished pieces:

"Ninja star guy"

"Ninja Guardian" peering over the edge of the crib

"Swingy guy"

"Kicky guy"

And behold, the finished product at last! I tried to get a couple of different angles so you could take in the full effect. =)

We are absolutely in love with our ninja nursery! Now it's time for our ninja baby to show up!!