growing baby

The baby’s room is basically ready at this point. The most important fixture in the room is naturally the crib—we have gone with the white/chocolate colored Babi Italia “Scandi” crib mainly for its contemporary look, and it’s fit very well. We’ve been pretty happy with the way the brown of our couch worked with a greenish wall, and the crib’s colors didn’t disappoint either. To make the room happier, we had applied giraffe wall graphic stickers from Wee Gallery — I think they really help make it clear that this is a baby’s room. Thanks Grace and Marty for the stickers!

Giant thanks to Linda’s parents for the crib and mattress, Sabrina for the sheets, and to Ellen’s mom Mary for the wonderful blankets you see draped over the side. You’ll also notice a “Mateo” pillow in the crib—thanks Kate and Dan! And of course, thank you to everyone who gave us a ton of clothing, blankets, and other goodies that are in the drawer below the crib.

We anticipate that the bulk of actual baby work for a while will take place on the changing table (and on the changing pad—thanks Marla). We got the table itself on Craigslist: much less expensive than buying something else brand new, and just as pretty. The baskets (thanks Ellen and Mary!) are full of diapers, blankets, sleep sacks, baby care items, etc. Thank you everyone for those! You will also notice a ton of diapers on the bottom shelf: even though we’re going to try to cloth-diaper the baby, we intend to use disposables when going out and early on when we’re going through them every few hours. Thanks to last-minute help from Olga and my Dad, we managed to qualify for a promo from Amazon that gave us a significant supply of Seventh Generation chlorine-free diapers. There’s also some books from our wonderful friends and relatives to keep us and the baby entertained and educated as he grows. I’m sure that we’ll be making a lot of “moo” and “oink” noises over the next few years. I also suspect that given the giraffes on the wall, we’ll be learning how to make giraffe sounds…

In addition to giraffes, there are also monkeys, a rhinoceros, bears, cows, and many many other wonderful toys that you’ve all given us and Mateo. For now, these are resting above the futon in the room (except for the monkey, who seems to prefer a monkey-hanging-pose apparently), and waiting for the baby to a) be born and b) grow old enough to play with toys. The futon, needless to say, is key to our ability to sustain a growing kid in the first few months: sometimes it’ll definitely be too much to crawl from bed to the baby’s room in the middle of the night—the futon provides a much needed middle ground. By the way, the bag in the lower-right corner is the hospital bag for when the time comes.

Finally, take a look at one of the walls in the room – it’s full of pictures. These were drawn by Linda’s friends at her baby shower last month (well, my picture got added to the mix, hee hee!). Giant hugs to Linda, Marla, Hilary, Geneva, Mary, Ellen, Christina, Ana, Courtney, Sabrina, Laura, (me), Larissa, and Rachel.

Other than the closet (which will remain hidden, thank you very much), you’ve now seen it all!