Nursery Preview

We've spent a little bit of time so far getting the nursery ready. I already clued you in on the paint choice, which I'm still pleased about.

Some folks have been asking me about a nursery theme. In our quest to create a fun nursery, we've run through a couple of ideas. And there are some really cool, really cute decorations available.

My initial plan involved a Super Mario theme, and was one of several reasons we chose the wall color we did. But then I realized how expensive the vinyl sticker sets were, and I'd probably need to get at least two sets to do it up right. Then Hollie and I started balking on the notion of putting licensed characters on the walls of the kid's room. Now, it's not like we're going to eliminate all branded apparel/toys/decorations from our kid's life, (and this is a great discussion for another time) but putting giant cartoon characters on the walls is a slippery slope we aren't willing to slide down just yet.

Next, we thought about a generic, but playful, monster theme. As far as fabric for making sheet sets goes, there are a seemingly limitless number of options, if we're so inclined. We even picked up these random stuffed monster toys at the Disney store, which were crazy on-sale. Turns out Disney has a thing called the Happy Monster Band. Did anyone else know this existed? It's actually pretty cute, and the songs aren't bad, as far as children's music goes.

But we decided that while the colors for most of these options are nice, bright, and gender neutral, monsters as an entire concept probably skews a bit too masculine. And if I'm going to go out of my way to decry pink as an option for my little girl, I probably shouldn't go all the way to the opposite side, just in case it turns out that we have a boy.

So sticking with the color palette that a lot of the monster and Nintendo stuff had, we decided to just go fun, cheery, bright and high-contrasty (it's a word, trust me.)

To that end, we got these curtains we found on our last trip to IKEA. In addition to the red and blue on the bottom 2/3 of the fabric, there are squares of dark blue, yellow, green, pink and red. A nice variety of colors, I think.

In addition to the curtains, we're going to use Wall Pops, these vinyl color blocks you can get at A.C. Moore. You'll have to wait until we're finished to get the effect on the whole room, but I think it's going to be pretty sweet.