Nursery Part 2

And here are the other two walls of the baby room :)

We had two of these old window frames that were pulled off some buildings being torn down. One of them is in the dining room and I finally got around to sanding/painting/putting mirrors into/ and hanging the other one. 

I love the way this fabric flower wreath turned out! Wreath foam and little birdie and the lamp below also thanks to Haley :)

Cuteness shoes I found here.

And the last wall. 

Ruffled crib skirt was the first project I did for the room.

Frog blankie on the left was Caed's and Dog blank was a gift from our good friends Tom and Angie

LOVE Love love the way these look. All these ideas were on my pinterest board for this room. And you never really know how things will look all done. I got the paper lanterns for a few kuai each via taobao. The fabric was mostly from our old clothes. These took lots of cutting and glue gunning!

Caed has lots of things he enjoys doing, drawing is not one of them. It is hard to get him to sit down and draw pictures at this point. But one night when it was past bed time I called him out of his room for a 'special project' and had him draw these pictures. I transferred them via pencil scratching onto the canvases. 

As far as baby's name goes, we aren't keeping it a secret, we just haven't fully chosen her name yet. There is a name we really like and we wrote it on there in pencil to see how it looked (hence the blue block thingy) but we aren't 100% sure yet! The one on the bottom left says "gege & meimei" which is big brother and little sister.

I had also seen this idea on pinterest a long time ago - framing fabric and using dry erase marker to write different quotes etc on it. The quote says:

I will sing of Your mercy
That leads me through valleys of sorrow
To rivers of joy

When we first found out we were pregnant back in Thailand I woke up one morning with this song in my head. I can't even remember how long it had been since I heard it or where even I had heard it. After I looked up the lyrics it fit all of the things I had been going through/was going through for the past 2 years. Great song - you can see lyrics here. Almost daily these lyrics come to mind so they seemed like the perfect first thing to put on this picture/quote frame.

Made this pennant banner out of fabric scraps and card board. 

Sewed the edges and hot glued them onto a string.

And the view looking out the door

Lastly the book shelf to the left when you walk into the room. 

Three more days until I leave, and then the next time I come back into this apartment there will be a little baby with us! Surely many more pictures of this room with her in it will fill this blog. 

Thank you so much for all the sweet comments on this room!

Nursery Part One

 Warning tons of pictures ahead that will probably only be interesting to a few of you out there :)

I am so happy to be able to share baby's room with you all. Wish Grandma and Nana were here to see it in real life, but as they are not, I dedicate these next few posts to them :)

We started off with a 8.8 x 8.8 foot room {and that is not the smallest of the rooms in our apartment!}

When I think about the fact that I actually got to decorate a nursery I get all overwhelmed with emotion.  With Caed we never did one as we were moving so much in his first few years of life. Then just the whole fact that we are actually pregnant again after such struggle... Then to be in apartment where we could have a room just for her, blessing! I am pretty sure that all of our Chinese friends think we are crazy. They think it's weird that Caed has his own room (I think the cut off for moving into your own room/bed for the average Chinese child is 8-10 years old). So having a whole room for an infant is well, not normal. But I love to decorate, and doing DIY/crafty/refurbishing is a fun hobby for me personally. So most nights when C was in bed I spent many hours hanging out with Sean and my glue gun/sewing machine. 

View from the door looking in 

We got this love sign from Sean's sister Heather. I painted it white and added fabric to match baby's room. Thinking of the whole room I think we only purchased two new things, all the rest we already had and re-made, or bought second hand. Lots of DIY stuff ahead...

And a HUGE thanks to our friends Adam and Haley - when they left to go home to the US this summer she left us so much crafty stuff, not to mention the sewing machine, and chair in the corner! I think almost all of the projects that follow have some part of them that came from Haley :)

Cute bunting made from fabric scraps, poster board, sewing machine and glue gun.

The changing pad cover I also made, that was an interesting endeavor. The bottom stitching is just plain ugly, but it works!

The changing table was bought for $5 at the second hand furniture market. It took a ton of work, sanding, painting, cleaning. The mobile in the left corner was the last finishing touch (paper for that, chair, pillow, knobs and paper on shelves all inherited from H :).

This was the before picture

Knobs and ruffles. 

I made the inserts for the doors with cardboard and fabric. I learned how to ruffle on the sewing machine and added these cute little ruffles. 

On the other side of the changing table I nailed in these baskets we had. I found this 31 days of prayer for your child free printable flip book via pinterest and put that in one basket along with a song book I had made a while back. 

The shelves were black ones from Ikea that we had bought over a year ago and never hung them. So I covered them with paper (thank you again H) and mounted them on the wall. By the way I did a ton of drilling/anchoring/hanging in this room. My dad would be very proud of how well I did with the drill on these obnoxious cement walls! Thanks for teaching me to be handy like you dad!

The vase is an old yogurt bottle painted white from the inside with some fabric glued around it. Frames all from H. 

More cute art prints all about love.  The one on the right I designed in photo shop. 

This is one of the two or three things we purchased new via taobao (the little animals). 8 yuan each :) 

These are Sean, Caed & me all around 3 months old. 

This little table was also bought at the second hand furniture market. It is one of the old elementary school classroom tables they used to use here. It also took a lot of sanding/cleaning/painting (special thanks to Sean for the sanding and painting on this one). 

Morning Exercises

In China, if you go out in the morning, you will most definitely see many businesses gather all their workers out in front of their shop and then play music and do morning exercises or group dance. 

I would almost feel bad about taking pictures, but then I think of how many people a day try to take pictures of our son and I don't feel so bad...

So random

And they start training them young for this future morning group exercising thing. See C in the front row?

Practicing away!

Whole Fish for the Kids

When transformers come to homeschool

Saw this mini kids sink in the mall the other day, if you look close you can see that the knob is broken so there is a rusty nail tied on to where the knob should be. {smile}

Onto the fish. We went out to dinner with one of Caed's classmates and her parents last week. They took us to a 'western' restaurant. You order individual dishes there and they insisted we eat the steak. But steak here is a bit different, always smothered in pepper sauce, served with noodles (and more pepper sauce), and of course an over easy egg. We had said Caed would just share ours with us, but then this fish dish came out. She said that she ordered the fish for Caed and DingDang to share. It was a whole fish, eyes and all. Caed poked around with it. Neither child ate a bite, but I thought it was delicious - better than the steak :)

his face 

haha

The Quilt

It has been quite a while since I have made any sort of blanket/quilt - like 6+ years...

But I was determined to use all the leftover fabric from meimei's (little sister) room to make a matching blanket.

A few online tutorials later (I had completely forgotten how to bind a quilt!) and it was done

Yeah!

Here it is laying on the crib mattress. And with that the baby room is complete (good thing, I leave in 5 days). Get ready for lots and lots of pictures of the final product very soon.

p.s. weather here has been crazy. That first picture was from less than a week ago and I was wearing shorts and a tank top, then all of the sudden it's freezing out! And I have to dig out all my winter clothes and try and fit something on :)

Counting Down

Less than 2 weeks until I leave for Thailand! So the count down is on. I am putting finishing touches on baby's room (can't wait to show you all that!), making meals like crazy for the freezer (as Sean and Caed will have 16 days here without me, and they may end up eating fried rice from the place downstairs everyday if I don't make some frozen food :) And trying to get all our paper work etc sorted before I go. 

Yesterday was 34 weeks. Last night while C was supposed to be in bed I was taking a couple pictures and he heard me and hopped out of bed to join in the fun. A few weeks ago he was looking at pictures on the camera and asked, "Why do you have so many pictures with your hands like this?" and put his hands on his tummy. So this just cracks me up :) His smile...

Enjoying a few more outings as a family of three - at a play area in the city

and what happens when you try to get Caed to take a picture of us...

better but not great :)

We also got to go on a double date with our friends on Monday and it was so much fun to be out together with them and no kids!