When I last posted in this space — more than a year ago! — I highlighted the nursery I had belatedly decorated for Mint Julep. Presciently, I wrote, “By the time I could make {every last little design dream for this room} happen, I’ll probably be redesigning it for a new phase of his life or to accommodate a sibling, God willing!”

While I haven’t yet redesigned that room, I have, in fact, redesigned our fourth and final bedroom to accommodate a sibling — for, in the time that I have not written, I’ve carried and birthed our third baby! Cinnamon Sugar arrived at 10:33 p.m. Aug. 31, 2017, and has pretty seamlessly initiated himself into the family, utterly bewitching the Oilman and me and savvily ingratiating himself with Sweet Potato and Mint Julep in short order.

If “Cinnamon Sugar” seems like too sickeningly sweet a nickname for a tubby little tank of a baby boy (at five months, he’s wearing 12-mo. hand-me-downs from his big brother!), then I apologize, but “Cinnamon Sugar” he will nevertheless be dubbed because he could not possibly be any sweeter than he is!

At any rate, it seemed very apropos to resume my horrendously unpredictable blogging with a little spread of yet another nursery for yet another baby. Maybe I won’t write again until I can report another child and another nursery, but I hope I actually keep my writing resolutions this year!

This room, we call the “nine-day nursery,” and I am about to tell you why …

About two weeks before Cinnamon Sugar was due, I was scrolling Facebook and I happened upon the pictures of the gorgeous nursery of a friend’s baby girl. She reported: “This room was a nine-month labor of love!”

At that point, we had crammed Sweet Potato’s outgrown crib into our fourth bedroom along with whatever other random furniture remained in that room and had begun to call it “the baby’s room.” When I saw those beautiful pictures, I felt a pang of guilt and I suddenly remembered how “unsettled” I’d felt in the first six months of Mint Julep’s life as we moved him from room to room.

My nesting impulse kicked in and, even though I knew it would be some time before the baby would actually sleep in his room, I mentally committed to complete it before he actually arrived (again, it was two weeks before his due date!).

“I haven’t got nine months,” I thought, “but I do have nine days!”

Luckily, my parents are nearly always in the midst of some kind of home improvement project and are pretty talented in the so-called “servile arts,” so I quickly enlisted their invaluable help. I fanned through their ample collection of paint chips, selected a pale “Ghost Ship” blue, purchased paint and scurried my children out from underfoot. My dad and mom taped and painted the nursery in approximately 45 minutes.

All of the furniture, as well as the curtains and rug, we already owned. The pressboard dresser, chest and side table are from my childhood bedroom! The crib and glider were from Sweet Potato’s nursery.

We drew in a few fresh textiles to provide cohesion. My mom trimmed and lengthened the old red curtains, then sewed a matching runner for the dresser. I draped the glider with an old red quilt. Amazon Prime wondrously dressed the bed with almost-as-pretty-as-custom Carousel Designs bedding in a mere two days. The blue ticking on the two side tables also came from Amazon.

With a very generous Target gift card from a friend of the Oilman’s, I bought two new lamps and replaced the shades on two old lamps. An epic Hobby Lobby run rounded out the room with a few inexpensive, but fun decorative items, including the painting and motto above the chest of drawers, the wall shelf and the hanging red and blue paper balls. (I am such a sucker for party decorations as kid-room decor; Sweet Potato’s room prominently features cheap paper fans!) All of the other artwork and decorative objects were my own, collected from other rooms in the house because they matched the blue-and-red color scheme!

As with Mint Julep’s room, this nursery is not actually complete — I do intend to frame and hang a portrait of Cinnamon Sugar above the crib and to purchase an ottoman — but it was more or less ready and waiting in time for me to spend a few precious evenings praying over it before the baby actually needed to sleep somewhere other than my womb! He didn’t actually sleep here until several months after his birth, but he officially lives in this space now and seems to like it, if mercifully long nights of uninterrupted sleep are any indication!

 

H/t to Diana Kerr, whose post about the minimalist, Jesus-focused nursery she designed for her son Harrington reminded me that I love to look at pictures of babies’ rooms and made me think that, perhaps, others would like to look at pictures of this one and to Stratford Caldecott, whose mere introduction to “Beauty for Truth’s Sake” gave me hope that I might one day make enough sense of life to write something truly worthwhile. I hope he’d not be chagrined to be associated with a post about a nursery furnished with pressboard as old as I am!