Marin's Big Girl Room!

Big Girl Marin has been sleeping in her new big girl bed for about a month now. I didn't intend for her to start sleeping in it so soon, but after Jason emptied and painted the room, we decided to set up her new bed to get it out of the basement where it was waiting to be assembled. Once it was assembled, it looked so bare, so I decided to put the bedding on and Marin immediately said, "I sleep! I sleep! My bed!" So, we decided to try it out for a night. We packed her in with pillows surrounding her and expected her to get up 45 times and be back in the crib the next night. Not so. She's been sleeping there through the night ever since. She loves that bed and her new room.

I will admit, her naps are shorter by about an hour since she's been in the big girl bed, and she does wake up earlier and come into our room. However, the earliest she usually wakes up is at 7:00am, so we really can't complain.

So, about the room: I searched and searched and can't believe I don't have a "before" picture from when this room was our guest bedroom, except this one after we had already moved all of the furniture to the middle of the room and taken all of the window treatments down. Guess it just wasn't that exciting. I do have before pictures from when we first moved in, and had to take down the dreaded wall paper in this room. Katy and I labored on that for an entire day, until we were literally pealing pieces off in the dark. We estimated the wallpaper that was in this room to have been over 50 years old, and it came off in pieces about an inch long at a time, if we were lucky. Jake tried to help, but he HATED this with a passion, and quickly was dubbed "errand boy" running back and forth fetching us supplies that we were sure would work to get bigger pieces off. The walls needed major repair, so even when we moved in, they looked really rough. I did take a picture of our first overnight guests, Ross and Emilie, sleeping on an air mattress in the room the first weekend we moved in.

When it was time to convert it to Marin's room, I was overjoyed to finally give her a true "girls room". Since she'd been sleeping in the nursery, and we didn't know what her gender would be, everything was yellow and green and unisex. Marin is definitely girly, so the shoe definitely fits in her new pink room. I decided that I wanted to add a chair rail to the room, paint stripes in two colors of pink on the top, and paint a solid bold pink on the bottom. After I found the bedding, I matched the colors and wiggled my magic wand and told Jason to get to work. :) After Marin's big bold horizontal stripes in her old nursery in Chicago, Jason wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of painting the stripes again, but lucky for me, he obliged and even admitted that he thinks it's a perfect little girls room.

I knew that I wanted to have built in floating bookshelves in the already recessed space in the wall to display Marin's treasures and some books and things. But the dimensions of the space were too big for the pre-made shelves I had seen. So, Jason the worker bee came to the rescue again, and made them himself, so that they would fit exactly right.

We moved Marin's bookshelf that my dad made for her when she was born, in from the nursery and repurposed an old side table as a bedside table. We are awaiting a dresser, and a few final touches, like pictures on the walls, but otherwise it's basically complete. Marin gave some of her books that are really babyish to the baby and now points those out in the nursery as "baby's books".

Marin's new room is fun and bright and I'm sure some day she'll be dying for a more grown up sophisticated look, but for today, I'm seizing her girly, sweet personality and love of pink... and holding on for dear life.