Finishing Touches

I'm 35 weeks pregnant now - hard to believe that we've basically got a month (give or take) before the baby makes her debut.  We figured this weekend would be a good time to wrap up some final projects in the nursery.  This week's project was art!

A few months ago I was peeking around on the internet looking for art ideas that tied in with the woodland "theme" we'd started with the tree decals and I stumbled across Amy's Sullivan's Etsy Shop. Amy makes beautiful modern prints of all sorts of things from bears and whales to even weeds and chairs (seriously! Go look at her stuff, it's really cool!!).  When clicking through the site I also found these incredible cryptozoology prints of legendary creatures that I figured would be right up Andy's alley.  The second he saw them, he totally fell in love with them and I knew that's what we'd be putting up in the baby's room.  I put him on the task of picking a couple for us to hang (I was thinking 2-3) and he ended up buying a collection of five because he couldn't choose.  When we received our prints in the mail, Amy was sweet enough to throw in the 6th print for FREE along with a really sweet note about how to care for the prints and thanking us for our purchase, which I love.  Buying from Etsy is like buying something from a friend.  (Sorry Amazon).

I was so eager to get the pictures into frames that I didn't take any photos of them before I put them on the wall.  I DID, however, take a picture of Ripley helping me get everything framed:

I was going to get them custom framed, but we just spent all our money (even with a 70% off coupon at Michaels) doing this with some other art that Andy bought me LAST Christmas and couldn't even imagine what doing six more things would cost.  A lot of the other stuff we have in the house I framed myself by just buying some mats and frames and figured that would be okay for now.  Bonus - the frames were buy one get one free at Michaels, so we only paid like $36 for 6 frames.  Bargain!

Here are the pictures now that they're up on the walls.  You can go to Amy Sullivan's Etsy Shop (or come visit us!) to get a better view of them.

The Loch Ness Monster - note the baby Nessie.  All of the prints have the "monster" with its baby version.  These pictures are so cute I can barely handle looking at them, and if you know Andy, you know how perfect these are for any child of his.

Jackalope!  True story - due to the crafty taxidermied specimens of these you'd often see at places like Wall Drug, I spent a significant period of my childhood thinking these were real.

Kraken! Look at the baby krakens!

Sasquatch - indigenous to my home state of Washington. Also, kind of a hippie.

The Merman.  LOOK AT THE BABY MERPERSON WITH THE WATERWINGS!! I die!

Chupacabra.  Also not completely convinced this one is made up.

We also put up some shelves to display the baby's books.  Eventually I know we'll have too many to store on the shelves, but it's added cute art and keeps them accessible.  I may put a third shelf up later to have one that she can get to once she's up and moving around.  The shelves are from Ikea.  Thanks to Amazon, we can buy Ikea items even though we don't have one up here.  We just have to suck it up and live with the fact that all of the items cost twice as much than if we'd bought them from Ikea directly...

Many of these we got for our shower! Thanks friends! 

So here's the whole formerly blank wall:

before:

and after!

The other two prints are hanging on the wall next to the opening to the closet.  I forgot to take a picture...

I can now confidently say that the room is basically DONE.  We still have to put sheets on the crib mattress, hang the mobile, and get a changing pad for the dresser, but that stuff is all pretty simple. Also, we plan on having her sleep in the room with us in her pack n play for the first chunk of time anyway, so the crib can continue to wrangle stuffed animals for the time being.  I really love how the room has come together!!