It’s funny, when I think of my babies I think of their nurseries even though they spent very little time in them. There is something magical about nurseries in my mind. Maybe it is the promise of a sun-filled softly decorated room with white furniture and toys. Maybe it’s nostalgia for days gone by and for wishes of babies and children.
I’m a big planner and one thing that made pregnancy easier was for me to have everything planned and ready. The nursery was the zone for that. It was the room that said “we are ready,” even when we felt we never would be!
I also love to design and dream and draw. Designing how I wanted our nurseries to look also helped me get through hyperemesis (when you throw up multiple times a day) with both my pregnancies. If I was miserable, it helped me keep my mind off of it. If I was laying down sick I could still draw, and I did! I found lots of drawings that I made of everything and lists too! My main influence and design ideas came from the special baby issues of Martha Stewart Living. They were beautiful! The armoire at the bottom was my favorite thing and so stunning!
All photos are from the Martha Stewart Baby Special Issue 2000Now this is a little odd, but my favorite nursery was Rosemary’s in the horror movie Rosemary’s Baby. I’m a big horror movie buff and the Victorian sets for this movie are swoon-worthy! The yellows in this nursery are lovely.
Thankfully I stuck with Martha Stewart! here are some more pics I found of her designs.
Including another styled pic of that great wardrobe!Oh the lists, as a new parent I had NO IDEA what we needed, and it turns out we needed very different things than were on the lists the books told you to get. For instance, I don’t remember seeing a breast pump on hardly any lists, but it was the most expensive purchase we had to make at $300.00 in 2005. My husband and I probably should have planned better for that expense, but oh well. I used it when I went back to work and again with my second baby. It kept my supply up beautifully and I met and exceeded all my breastfeeding goals! I also don’t remember seeing baby slings on the lists and I used them constantly with both babies. Things I never used were the snowsuit, the playpen, hooded towels, all the weird layette clothes, hard shoes, diaper pins, bottle warmer, waterproof covers, a diaper genie, the swing, crib pads, etc. The next time around, I was much savvier!
My favorite thing, and something I was excited about for the nursery was the Amy Coe for Target collection called Cirque des Enfants. The vintage prints and toiles were all color-coordinated and the boy/girls stuff was even coordinated! Plus I swoon over sage-y greens.
Things we didn’t need or end up using- pretty much the entire nursery! Oh no! Our babies both slept with us and lived in our bedroom until they moved to their beds in their rooms. But they were so fun to set up! After we figured out the baby did best with us, I made nursing nooks in both bedrooms of the houses we lived in. These worked a lot better!
The nook on the left was for our darling girl. I used my changing table from when I was a wee babe, it had drawers and a a shelf. The nook on the left was for our sweet boy. The changing table was my bedside table. Here, I set my nook up by a bookshelf and used a smaller rocker, an Eames RAR. I still have it and sit in it every day!The real joy of my child-rearing years equipment-wise, was our pram. I got it at a used children’s clothing sale when my DD was about 4 months old. It is a big Peg Perego from Italy. It was made in 1998, but it is great condition still! It glides over gravel roads (what we have a lot of here) and bumps in ancient sidewalks are just perfect for rocking a tired baby! We lived close to our church for a long time and would often walk there with our little one in the pram!
Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of photos of the two nurseries I made, or the photos are very poor quality. One of our laptops was knocked off of a table because a little one got tangled in the cord and we lost a lot of things on the hard drive. When we went to buy a new laptop I got one with a magnetic cord end- perfect no more broken hard drives!
These are the photos from my DD’s nursery in our very first house, a wonderful, big bungalow. My DS had his crib and armoire in his sissy’s room in our second house, a cramped newer house. I can’t find those photos anywhere. Hopefully I will find them one day. That room had the most darling arts and crafts wallpaper!
This nursery was almost entirely thrifted or passed down. All the white furniture except the big wardrobe was my baby furniture- even the crib. It is some kind of amazing furniture made in Finland and it’s been through lots of babies in our family!
As you can see my love of old toys goes back very far!
Since my babes were born in the winter-time I tend to get very baby-dreamy this time of the year and get in nesting mode. I might be snuggling them extra-long tonight at bedtime! With nursery dreams and baby love to you from Kansas Street,
-Jaime
Life on Kansas Street 