the baby room part 2 - picking a theme

it was some time between early - mid september. and although i'm not exactly sure what day of the week it was, i feel like it was a tuesday or a thursday. whichever day it was, i came home from a long and boring day at work and i was eager to sit down with mike and talk about a theme for the baby room. you see, earlier that morning as i was meandering around the unfinished baby room when i had an idea pop in to my head. and throughout the day this idea evolved in to a sold theme for the baby room and i was ubber supper dupper excited about it...

so, as i sat down beside mike and began to mention that i had a theme for the baby room, mike said he also had a theme... uh oh... two themes, one baby room.

some luck. what are the chances that we both had a sort of "ahh ha" moment as to what our theme for the baby room could be both in the same day? now, if you know mike and i, you'll know we have totally opposite taste in just about everything. **side note: opposites do attract. mike and i are some sort of proof.** poor mike. he looked at me and i could see that he just sort of gave up his theme. basically, before we even shared with each other what our theme was, he said that his theme didn't matter since i had one of my own and that i could do whatever i had in mind. now i felt bad. but i was so absorbed with my theme that i was secretly exuberant that he was going to let me do my theme... maybe he could see how excited i was about it even before i shared it. maybe he couldn't. whatever the case, at that point neither one of us really wanted to share our theme. but we did.

mine was birds and his was monkeys. we were both trying to think of something that was gender neutral... animals are a safe bet. both would have made great themes and truthfully, it all depends on how you apply it really. mike had been on some websites that day and seen some really neat decals of monkeys on one of them. it gave him an idea for a really good theme. i had sort of done the same thing that morning; while meandering around the baby room, thinking about what to do in there, i saw the bird cage from our wedding (see image below - we used it to collect the gift cards from guests) which sparked a whirlwind of ideas in my head.



and that was that! i had my theme. and in case you haven't picked up on which theme we are moving forward with; birds or monkeys? we are going with birds. i was too excited about it to not take mike up on his offer to let me go ahead and do it. he loves me...

at first, i wanted to do a sort of antique type of bird theme. using bird prints and posters with accents of victorian patterns and lace. what follows are a few images that illustrate the sort of things i was seeing in my head.

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i felt that this could pass as gender neutral as long as i took it easy on the lace and victorian stuff. i loved it! but i sort of felt it was too much and not right for a baby. might be better suited for an adult... plus, i think mike would have looked at me with the stink eye of a thousand tigers, knowing that this was not baby room material, much less something he would even like. so, throughout the day it morphed and evolved into something more friendly and easily workable in to a baby room theme.

i had decided to move away from the whole antique and victorian feel and more towards a solid black silhouetted-bird type of theme. the main source of decor would be wall decals and framed artwork by myself. i could custom design fabulous things and have them produced through one of the many great sites i use online, or i could even buy straight up already made things somewhere... the possibilities were endless. here are a few images to show you what i was now gearing up for.

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and actually, that first image is of a set of wall decals that you can find at target.com. originally, i wanted to custom design a bunch of stuff. but then i saw those decals at target.com and decided that they will do just fine. so i got some, courtesy of my friend lori petsu!

and that is the story of how the theme of the baby room came to be - birds!

those decals, along with some handy-made artwork that i framed, the dark wood furniture purchased online and from ikea, a handful of other home decor and accents and our lovely paint job (that came after we picked this theme) - the baby room is lookin' pretty nice. just you wait and see!

...............jfk..............