Updates: Nursery and Fatness

Hey, I said I'd have the room finished by March 1, and I made it (well, pretty much)!  This weekend I had a super surge of energy that allowed me to do almost everything around the house that I could do to avoid grading essays, AND to grade essays.  Of course, I did too much and my body hurt like hell afterward, but it's a small price to pay for the feeling that everything is in its place.  Now, this new pelvic-bones-loosening-up-to-make-way-for-Matt's-son's-giant-head sensation is, well, less than pleasant.  Oh well.  I'm 36 weeks, so only a few left to go, right?

Okay, so here's how fat I am at 36 weeks.  And that is a professional hairstyle and those are designer yoga pants.

Try, if you can, not to be too jealous of my mad fashion skillz.

But let's be honest, fatness if far less exciting than a super fun little kid's room.  Here we go!

The view from the hallway.

View from the door.

The closet.  Totes took the doors off and hung curtains so that we could access the entire closet all at once.

Boy clothes as far as the eye can see. . .  Matt says that the kid will just wear an outfit and then we'll throw it away.

We left the bed in the room so that we can still have a decent place for guests to sleep.

I want one of these for myself.

And, now, my totes favorite part of the room.  And our boy's name!  (Trying to keep people from being able to stalk him on the world wide web until he at least has some teeth.)

 Notes: name banner idea from here (I used Georgia font size 500), dino-brite instructions here. The cradle is the same one Matt slept in when he was a tiny little baby.  I'm in love with it.

Stole the wall idea from Sassy Curmudgeon. Our boy's picture will go in the middle (If he's cute.  If he's not cute, we'll probably just get a picture of Scott Baio.)

Well, there you have it.  Isn't it the most fun?

Dinosaur Mobile!

Months and months ago, maybe even before I was growing a fetus, I started eyeing baby mobiles on Etsy.  Truth be told, if I could have 25 mobiles hanging in every room of my house, I would.  So narrowing it down to just one (or let's be honest--2 or 3 probably when it's all said and done) was pretty tough.

Here are some of my favorites.

 (umbrella mobile, hanging monster mobile, and felt ball mobile)

I wanted something that I could make myself (because I'm the cheapest person alive), that would be super fun, and that would go with the rest of the room, and that would be something that the kid could play with later.  I had it narrowed down to either monsters or dinosaurs, and what do you think won out (after I made Cassie make the decision for me)?

DINOSAURS!

Here was my inspiration:

dinosaur mobile

I got myself some supplies: felt, embroidery thread, and one of those ring things from craft stores that I don't know what they're called, but old ladies use them a lot.  (I spent like $15 on supplies when I really only needed like $6 worth of them.  So if you need a mobile, just let me know.  We're swimming in felt 'round these parts!)  I already had some stuffing stuff, and if I hadn't I probably could have used the guts from Mitch's toy that he destroyed this morning.  

And I used the picture of the original mobile as a guide to draw a couple of the dinosaur shapes.  I wanted to have a couple more types, so I found silhouettes online printed them out.  Then I cut the shapes out in cardstock and used them to cut out shapes in the felt.  After some stitching and stuffing stitching again, we had some cute little dinos.

And then I hung them up on my ring thing with some string, and look!

(I placed my dinos face-down so that the baby would have a better view of them.  I also tied the strings to little tabs on the dinos backs so that I could take them off and let the kid play with them later, hopefully on his felt dinosaur mat.)

I'm kind of obsessed, and I hope the boy enjoys them, too.  He better, because I just we just spent all day yesterday at birthing class and I had to watch 4 videos of babies being born, and if he's going to do that to my body, then he'd sure as hell better enjoy my dinosaurs.  And if he doesn't, we'll fight.  I could totally beat a baby in a fight.

Dino-Brite!

So, like a year or so ago, I saw this little craft project on Martha Stewart and flipped out over its awesomeness.

I also figured that, assuming that I didn't use Martha's $2,000 canvas and her $95 paint, I could do this one on the cheap.  Originally, I wanted to put this in our living room on the mantle, so I painted it the color that I paint pretty much everything in our house these days: light turquoise.  I didn't know what design to do, and I figured that I wouldn't start the actual project until I knew for sure, until I had that "Oh, there you are, Peter" moment.

And then I got knocked up, and I decided that the grown-up lite brite didn't need to be grown-up at all, because it would be awesome as nursery decor, and could also function as a nightlight for little ole' Blast and for us.  So then I decided that it needed to be a shark.

But, after careful consideration, I decided that 1.) I needed to repaint the canvas because Blast's room is already light turquoise, and 2.) a shark might be too scary.  (Trying to use all of my allotted scaring-the-bab tokens for telling him about Krampus.)  So, after a very informal polling of friends, I decided to instead paint the canvas orange and to do a design that was even be better.  A DINOSAUR!

So here's how the process went.

1.  Paint canvas. (Using little sample thing of paint from Home Depot--$3)

2.  Borrow overhead projector from school.  (Def made it easier for me, but you could totes do this project without one.)

3.  Google "brontosaurus silhouette" and find this.

4.  Trace silhouette onto transparency.

5.  Pencil silhouette onto back of canvas.

Maybe next I should work on actually putting pictures in the frames in our gallery wall?

6.  Mark spots for lights to go through with a pencil.
7. Cut small slits into canvas with an exacto knife where lights would go.
8. Pop lights through spots.

And, voila!

I actually used button lights from Target, which worked perfectly for this project because of their size.  You can do it with regularly-sized lights, but you'll need to use craft glue or a glue gun to secure each light.  I would highly recommend using the button lights because they're not only much simpler, but you can also easily replace the strand if the strand goes kaput.

Also, you should know that it is really hard to get a good picture of the dino-brite, especially if you're impatient and hungry and wishing that you were lying on the couch watching Parenthood instead.  The dino-brite looks approximately 50 times better in person. Plus, it only cost like $15 to do, which makes me happy because I'm a cheaposaurus.

Mitch is also a big fan.

Now I kind of want to make a million of these, so I've been trying to think of other shapes and designs to do.  A bicycle!  A squirrel!  A snowflake!  A Mitch!

What else?