My First Mother's Day

 I've never been a huge fan of Mother's Day (as evidenced by this post of yore) but this past Sunday I took some time to think about what being a mom has been like for the last five months.

In a word - awesome. In 34 words - the hardest freaking thing I've ever done that is making me a better person, drawing me closer to God and my husband, and making me grateful for my sweet boy, in all my life. 

Often throughout my pregnancy, I would think "I'm ready to be a mom. This is why we waited five years to have kids, because I wanted to wait until I was ready to be a mom. I'm ready now." I was tired of the quiet house that I worked in every day, I was ready for some chaos. I was bored with my day to day routine, I was ready for some change. Lover and I had enjoyed five happily married years , and now I was ready to add to our happy two-some. 

I was really sick throughout my pregnancy but God and Lover helped me through it. Labor and delivery went fairly well, with the exception of a tense final hour and a half where little man's heart rate was climbing and being born not breathing. and before I knew it I was holding a tiny bundle in my arms, meeting my son for the first time. 

Just a couple of days later the hospital sent us home, and that first night at home was terrifying. I was completely overwhelmed with the responsibility (and the hormones!) and could not believe that trained medical staff just allows you to take home a helpless infant without some sort of parental aptitude test. 

But we survived that night, and the first few sleepless weeks after that. And in those first few weeks I got a glimpse of what it would be like to be Javi's mom for the rest of my life. In a word - amazing. In 18 words, an amazingly challenging experience that would continue God's refining work in me for the rest of my life.  

I'm not as sleep deprived anymore (although I have some great stories from those blurry weeks!) and boy am I thankful for more sleep. But those really hard months are teaching me that God multiplies our love, patience, endurance, grace and even our sleep when we ask him to. There are so many days when I think  "I cannot make it through this day without losing it" and when I remember to turn to God and beg for his help, he graciously grants it. 

I've never before experienced the power of God in me on such a daily basis. When I am resting in him and letting him carry my burdens, my heart soars. I'm amazed that he entrusted me with such a wonderful little guy. 

I'm so thankful that God blessed us with such a happy healthy boy.  He's perfectly healthy - perfect and thriving as his doctor says. He discovers something new every day and his tenacity to grow and develop new skills amazes me every day. At five months old  he is teaching me about pursuing your desires wholeheartedly without fear. I'm so thankful to be Xavier's mom. I'm thankful for the joy he brings to my life, for the fun he adds to our family, and for the lessons that I will be learning as his mom for the rest of my life. 

Javi's Nursery

 OK, let's talk about the nursery, shall we? It's such a fun and happy space, and I am so happy with how it turned out. I won't review the before pictures again, but my goodness, this room looks nothing like it did before! :-) 

I wanted a simple, fun room for our little munchkin. When I started planning the room we hadn't found out if we were having a boy or a girl, but I knew that either way I wanted the room to be a fun, functional place for a baby, without being gender specific. 

So I decided on a color scheme of soft, sunny yellow, deep blues and pops of happy red. I also wanted a very loose circus/ animal scheme. Nothing like this room, 

which I thought might be a little over the top, but just some fun, simple touches. :-) Plus when I showed Lover this picture, his eyes kind of glazed and he muttered something under his breath which sounded a lot like "not on your life" :-)  I also found this quilt online and sent an email to my quilting expert mom asking her how hard it would be to reproduce this for the baby's room. 

I have a thing for pennants, they are just so happy and fun, and I liked how they tied into the circus theme very subtly. My mom responded that she would be happy to make the quilt for Baby K - awesome! So I set to work finding the right fabrics to make a fun, primary colored quilt for baby K. And not long after, I found this super fun elephant fabric:

It was perfect for the nursery - primary colors? Check! Slight circus theme? Check! Elephants? Check! Throughout the course of my pregnancy and pulling Javi's room together I became mildly obsessed with elephants. They are just so adorable to me! 

But back to the quilt - I picked out a bunch of complementary fabrics, and after snipping off a few pieces for another project, I shipped them off to my mom to work her quilting magic on them. The resulting quilt is beautiful and fun, and I need to do a separate post on it to really do it justice. 

Next up I made a "sprocket pillow" out of the fabrics from the quilt. 

I used this tutorial, and it went really quickly. I use the pillow every night to nurse Javi. It's the perfect thickness and size to support my arm on the armrest. And it's so happy with all those fun fabrics! 

The pillow and quilt rest on the chair that used to reside in the living room. It's a super comfortable, rocking armchair, and I made a slipcover for it out of bleached dropcloth. The fabric is super durable and it made a tired old chair look much much better! I've logged a lot of hours in that chair in the last five months, and I am so glad I chose something so comfortable! :-) 

The cradle is the one that my brothers and I used when we were babies. Turns out before we moved to Spain my mom asked my aunt to store it for her, and it's been in storage for the last fifteen years. It's none the worse for the wear - and I love that it's a family heirloom. And look- there's another elephant! :-) 

Above the cradle is a sweet paper pennant banner that my sister in law made for my shower. It says Baby Javi and it is just the perfect bit of color for this side of the room. Javi noticed it really early on, and loved looking at all the paper patterns. 

Here's the other side of the room. My craft supplies still fill up those two cupboards on the side for now. Once the munchkin is bigger and requires more room I'll have to move it all out of there. we converted the desk area into a changing station and it's working out famously. The curtained off area hides extra diapers and wipes, and the humidifier. The two drawers hold all sorts of baby goodies, and the little blue caddy on the desktop holds diapers, wipes and kleenex. I made the curtain and the changing cover from a striped flat sheet from Walmart. $5 for a ton of fabric! I made a mobile to hang over the changing pad, and Lover built a shelf to hang above to hold more little baby items. I then commandeered the shelf to display cute baby stuff, including another elephant! :-) 

I wanted something fun and different for the mobile, and it took me a while to land on this design. I found the instructions for these paper ornaments, and just strung them all up together to form a mobile. Because they are so light they move in the slightest breeze, which is really neat. 

Baby's view is pretty neat! :-) 

The shelf above holds a framed verse, two little picture frames and my favorite little shoes that Javi's worn so far. A few other decorative items round out this shelf for now, and I love it. Here you can also see the little wooden animals that we put on the wall - they were each 69 cents from Hobby Lobby, and Javi's current favorite thing to do is try to pull them off the wall! :-) 

These frame cubes were a shower gift, and they've got a few more decorative doo dads. That ceramic elephant planter was a gift from my grandma, and of course we have a Green Bay Packers monster truck so Javi will grow up to be a good fan. :-) I bought the sign at Goodwill a few years ago and it worked perfectly in here! 

The curtains are just simple white sailcloth curtains from Target that I added a yellow ribbon stripe to. The little table is also from Goodwill - four bucks! 

I made a muslin curtain for the closet and trimmed it out with some of that sheet fabric. All of Javi's teeny tiny little clothes, blankets, etc hang out in there, in a somewhat orderly fashion. :-) 

In that picture you can also see the blue ribbon that Lover added to the light pull chain. It is super functional - at night I can walk in with hand outstretched and immediately find the light. Plus, Javi's new favorite thing is to turn it on and off himself (while we're holding him of course). Its super cute to see him reach his hand out when we walk in the room, and he is incredibly proud of himself when he manages to yank the ribbon hard enough to turn on the light! 

We bought the rug on eBay after searching all of our local stores for something that would work in our price range. Lover found it and I love it. The blue ottoman is from Walmart and holds a bunch of toys.  

Lastly, we replaced the door trim with the style that matches the rest of the house. We'll slowly be doing this in each room upstairs, but Javi's is the first to get the fancy treatment! 

So that's it! A fun little room for our awesome little man. I think my favorite part is still the mobile. Or maybe the quilt my mom made. Or the elephants! :) What's your favorite?

The Nursery: Before and After

 So for this post I am just going to show you the before and after pictures, and then next time I'll talk about where everything came from. Enjoy the drastic difference! :-) 

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After:

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I love the final result. It makes me smile every time I am in the room - which is a lot of time between changing diapers, nursing and rocking little man to sleep! :-)

Working on the Nursery

 OK, so last time I showed you what we started with in our third bedroom that would eventually become the baby’s room. At some point in the three years before we actually started working on this room, we tore out the beer fridge and the damaged drywall behind it.

Underneath the plaster wall was just absolutely crumbling, and it stayed covered up under a curtain until this summer when we started working on the room again.
In that shot you can also see how stained the ceiling was – the roof was only about two years old when we bought the house and obviously had been leaking because there were stains all over the office ceiling.

Apparently it had also been leaking into the eaves, because the lovely cork stretch above the paneling started literally falling down onto my desk over the last couple of years. I would sit down at the desk to edit pictures and crumbled chunks of plaster would be all over my keyboard. This is what it looked like before we put drywall over this whole area.

Not exactly safe for a baby, especially because this wall was the only one that was long enough for any kind of crib or cradle in the room. And I definitely did not want to see my baby covered in plaster chunks like my keyboard! :-)

And then of course the little builtin desk area across the room was still full of cork too, which had been glued onto plywood, which was nailed over the plaster. We tried a variety of ideas to get the cork off the plywood cleanly so we could just paint the plywood, but it was not to be.

We had to tear out the shelves, cork and plywood and repair the plaster wall underneath. Talk about a labor of love for this little baby!
So, we began the tedious process of demolition, putting up drywall, finishing the drywall and painting all of the drywall, paneling, the ceiling, trimwork and the closet. I didn’t take any pictures of this process because I was seven months pregnant and we were just trying to get things finished before the baby popped out, but so many people offered to help us – my friend Yesi let us borrow her SUV to buy the drywall, Jon and Steph came over one evening to help us prime everything, and then Steph came back another evening to help me paint the paneling. They were ridiculously helpful, and I made sure to provide lots of entertainment with my increasingly paint covered baby bump getting in the way. :-)

I spent an evening on the floor removing paint drips and splatters from all over the floor. Apparently the previous owners knew they were putting in carpet, so when painting they just went all willy-nilly with their brushes without regard for the floor. So I spent several hours scraping, pulling out rogue staples, and then cleaning and buffing the floor. The end result isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than where we started. But let me tell you, doing that while 7ish months pregnant - boy was I sore the next day! 

We also installed a light in the ceiling, so that there weren't just random wires hanging down as a fire hazard for the baby.  This light box isn't hooked up to a switch, so there's just a pull chain for it. I was worried about the functionality of that with a baby, but it hasn't been a problem. In this shot you can also see that we painted the ceiling. Some Kilz primer and flat ceiling paint and it was as good as new! :-) 

Next up, the after pictures! 

The Office (or Beer Room) that Became a Nursery

Wendhurst Castle has a main floor, a second story, a finished attic and a someday, hopefully, finished basement. We’ve worked hard on the second story to make it a comfortable place to spend our sleeping hours.
We’ve made over the master bedroom, a peachy pink, woodsy, metal window blinded room into a comfortable and cozy room for our daily (nightly?) use. You can read more about that process here.

We took the bunkbed filled, wallpapered, grass green carpeted second bedroom and turned it into a light and bright guest room with lots of contrast and class. Go here to see more before and afters.

We’ve even transformed the landing from this depressingly dark area to a fun and bright space.

Someday, we’ll also renovate the bathroom, but at least it’s not a dark brick filled fluorescent cave anymore.

So all that remained on the second floor in need of our attention was the “office/beer room/future office/eventually became the nursery” room. It’s a tiny room that was in okay shape structurally and had a lot of really functional built-ins, but like every other part of Wendhurst Castle, cosmetically it was a wreck. The only thing this room had going for it when we bought it was some nice Berber carpet, but we tore that out along with all the carpet in the first few weeks because living with someone else’s pet stained carpet is gross. :)  Oh and btw, the hardwood floors underneath were the most paint speckled, abused and ruined floors in the house. Except for maybe the guest room. Or the dining room. :-) 
Here’s what it looked like on our first walk through. Immediately on your left was the little closet.

It, like all of the walls not clad in cork or paneling, was painted a lovely shade of highlighter blue. A neon, bright, hurts-my-eyes to look at it shade of blue.

The back wall sported one window, a paneling clad wall, and above the paneling, where the ceiling slants a bit, a lovely stretch of cork. (Exactly like the cork in the living room)

The south wall was clad in more paneling, a funky builtin shelf, and the second window. I need to mention here that both windows are “custom made” windows that desperately need to be replaced. When we had a window guy out to quote us on new windows, he politely said “I’ve have never seen such… interesting, custom windows.” The back window does not open unless you unscrew the entire frame and literally pull it out of the wall. It’s genius I tell ya.

The west wall is entirely taken up by a builtin desk and cupboard. They are very functional, but again, more paneling, and more cork. And last up, the crème de la crème.

The wall mounted builtin beer fridge. Yep, you read that right. One of those small beer fridges was screwed into the wall with a lovely little builtin table below it. For setting your beer on, of course.
Funny story, after removing this fridge from the wall, we used it for a little bit and then decided to sell it. I put it on Craigslist for $40, and a guy emailed me about it within a couple of hours. He came with his family to pick it up, and told me he was going to put it in his garage to be, wait for it, his beer fridge! :-) No lie.
Anyways, so that’s where we started in this room. Initially this room was going to be my office/craft room, but renovating it got pushed to the back burner until I got pregnant, and then the need for a craft room was much less urgent  than the need for a safe, comfortable place for a baby. :-) Next up I’ll show you how we fixed up this room and made it into a cute, fun little room for our little man.