Wishes: Comfort

After a few months of steady (if not very constant) effort, Jeff and I have finished putting together the baby’s room. I’ve shown you pieces of it over time that I’ve made, but this is the entire enchilada.  And a woodsy and colorful enchilada it is, too. It’s supposed to be a sort of forest, if you were having a forest party, I guess.  It’s actually a tiny room (8×9?) so we didn’t want to clutter it up, and since we can’t paint our walls we had to figure out other way to make it cheerful.

I think the first thing we got for the baby was bedding back in August, right after we first found out, because we just really wanted to get something because we were so excited. It was one of those early moments of joy and trepidation and weakness. The bedding is called Treetop Friends from Skip*Hop. Being me, I liked the embroidery and applique, and the tree, and the colors, and the owl. So we got it, and we put it in a closet, and nothing else happened for a while.

Fast forward a few months and I finished putting all my crafting paraphernalia into the closet, and we had finally cleared the room of its random collection of junk. I finished the bunting and hung it up. The room continued to be used as a guest room. If you’ve been to my house, you know just how much different this looks now than it did (the sofa bed is the only thing the same). It was a very empty room. Then in January we decided we had to do something before I got too big to do anything.

Most of this is designed to have an impact without spending a lot of money, and to fit in storage without taking up much space. Also to be cute without making me want to throw up. We have a lot of vinyl decals in the room – birch trees, flowers, birds – to sub for paint. We got a couple of inexpensive pieces of art (one from Etsy, one from a local shop), cut matting and used plain IKEA frames. The crib is from Babyletto (it has storage!) and the Koppang dresser from Ikea. There’s a soft brown shag rug on the floor, and the gingham curtains I made in the window.

There is no art above the crib because – can anyone guess? We live in earthquake country! It would be terrible to have something fall into the crib!

The room is weird because although it is tiny, it has two gigantic closets. One is my sewing/crafting area, and the other is a deep closet with shelves. We hung a closet rod on one level, and the rest has baskets for the baby’s stuff – books, bottles, miscellany, toys, clothes that are too big now, etc. The crib stores bedding. Everything else is in the dresser. Her cosleeper is in our room, and the stroller normally lives in here too.

I also have a rocking chair, but I decided to leave the sofa bed in here. Having this in here means we can’t really have guests overnight very easily, and maybe only one person … but on the other hand, Jeff and I can nap here with the baby! I am going to get a throw blanket too. It’s a very comfortable and quiet place to sit or nap, and also a good flat place to catch overflow from the crafting area should I need it. I’m growing cuttings from my ivy and my spider plant to eventually hang in the window.

There are a lot of tiny details that went into making this room what it is. We found an inexpensive owl-print changing pad cover, and the dresser has hand-painted owl knobs! I’m not going to lie to you, I got a dresser with knobs so I could get nice knobs. It’s a thing I like.

In general I tried to make the leaves on the pillow I made echo the leaves in the bedding and the flower decals on the wall. There is a lot of brown and green in here, colors I love. I tried hard not to go overboard with owls, but … owls are cool. I substituted a few blue birds for some owls. There is such a thing as the bluebird of happiness, after all, so it only seemed appropriate.

Hope you enjoyed my tour I’m quite pleased with this room. I only wish I were as pleased with the rest of the house! It’s a nice room to just hang out in at this point, very calming to me. It looks exactly like a room I might have wanted when I was little – and in fact does echo some of the things that I had and loved when I was little – gingham, a white dresser with painted knobs, primary colors, and I’ve always loved trees and flowers.

Jeff, however, thinks it maybe doesn’t have enough raccoons yet, though.

Cravings

My husband posted this to Twitter last weekend. I am fortunate to have a husband who is willing to be patient and kind and helpful in many ways, no matter how weird or hungry I get during this pregnancy. I may have eaten four muffins in under 5 minutes.

In addition to muffins, he also kindly volunteered to write regular expression scripts for me when I was pulling my hair out over a ridiculously over-complicated programming problem. He is MULTI-TALENTED.

On the Miriam-is-mostly-useless side, I have to admit that the only crafting I got accomplished last week was four rows on my baby blanket and a dish of root-vegetable-and-phyllo pie. This may be a new low.

Small(er) Space Crafting

As you might imagine, impending parenthood has brought with it a variety of changes, and more to follow. One such change was the need to change my guest room/craft space into a Kid room. In the end, I decided not to move out, instead I just moved into the closet. Luckily for me and all my stuff, it’s a very large, deep nice closet. Behold:

In the following photographs you will see what a miracle of tidy organization that small closet has become. It has so many kinds of storage that it puts the Container Store to shame. You can’t go into it anymore, what I do is use a bar stool and sit at the tables behind the doors. I can access anything I need from that vantage point. The only real downside is that I can only have one side open at a time, since it is outfitted with sliding doors. But it’s only a minor inconvenience, and overall, I really love this amazing space.

When I started, though, I didn’t love it. I was deeply divided about this whole plan. Losing my crafting space to the baby was hard, in a symbolic way, and hard work, in a literal way. It was really the thing that brought home to me that I was actually going to magically produce a child in a few months. The trouble is that I am not a young chicken. I have been an adult for quite a while, and I am comfortable in my habits and identity. “What am I doing?!” I thought to myself as I worked. “Am I literally in the process of exchanging my identity for that of MOM?!” It was a panic-inducing thought.

Before you say, “Oh, that’s ridiculous” you should read this post from Kim Werker’s blog, in which she is scolded by a reader who thinks it’s terrible she doesn’t have “Mommy” in her blog blurb. Lots of times women do intentionally subsume their identities into Mom-hood, or prioritize motherhood above all other aspects of their identities. And there are women who can get quite nasty/condescending/scolding when that’s not your choice, as if it makes you a crappy parent. As for me, there are lots of private, personal reasons I chose to be a mother, but subsuming my identity into that role wasn’t one of them. In fact, it was one thing I really did not want to do.

So, no. Moving into the closet didn’t mean I was exchanging my identity, it just meant I was making room for a new aspect of it.Does that mean I’ll be a crap parent, or not care about my kid, as some might imply? No. It means I’m a reasonably happy, well-rounded, complicated individual, so it’s unlikely that any one aspect of who I am will ever completely subsume the rest of it. In the same way, the Kid won’t absorb all my writing here, either, because I would be bored senseless if all I ever made and talked about was baby stuff. It’s just  rather new at this point and therefore interesting, and also I’m under the influence of Nesting Hormones.

I imagine everyone approaches these things differently. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to how you make room for parenting in your life, but as a rather independent feminist with a career I don’t intend to give up, this is how I approach it. With caution and thoughtfulness, and the knowledge that I am perfectly able to go to Ikea and outfit a closet as an awesomesauce sewing lab.

And you thought I was just going to talk about my crafting closet.