James' Family Lines

(the names are blurred out just a little bit. in the real print, they are in black and really easy to see. they look great.)

p.s. if you love these family trees (the circle or the lines) and would like one for your family, contact me. I’ve decided to sell them. They’ll make a great Christmas present and if you contact me soon, I’ll be able to get it to you in time for Christmas.

As the day for Brennan to join us came, we started to make preparations. We got a mattress and put it on the floor in the room that would be his new room once the baby came (we would have to take the crib, chair and dresser apart to move them, so we didn’t want to change the room that would be the nursery).

NEW BED!

This was in July and James loved it. He thought the bed on the floor was the greatest thing. He would jump, say “BOOM” and fall on the bed.

Then I became worried that he would think it was only a toy and for fun and not a place to sleep. Then he got sick. He threw up one morning all over his crib and I bundled up all the bedding and threw it in the laundry and headed to the doctor’s office (it was his 15 month appointment that morning…I don’t just run to the doctor after just one throw up). On the way home from the doctor he fell asleep and I carried him into the house and was going to put him in bed, to my surprise there weren’t any sheets or blankets in his crib (I was 8 months pregnant, I had completely forgotten that I didn’t remake the bed after throwing the bedding in the laundry) and I decided to put him on his mattress and see how it worked for nap time.

It worked like a charm and we decided to move nap time to the mattress and new bedroom permanently.

Shortly after Brennan was born, I was still afraid to change bedtime to the new bedroom. James was sleeping so well in his crib. We read scriptures, said prayers, snuggled on the chair for a few minutes and put him in his crib and he went right to sleep on his own with no complaining or crying. Messing with such a good thing seemed like such a bad idea.

But it needed to be done and we did it and it is working just as wonderfully as the crib.

My favorite thing about James in the new bed is at night either Bryan or me will lay with him in bed for a little while until he gets sleepy enough to fall asleep on his own. The last little while, James has started to pull his binky out of it mouth, lean over and kiss us on the head and then put the binky back in his mouth and turn over. It is his signal to us that he wants us to leave. It is one of the cutest things ever.

I love my sweet Baby James.

To make the transition even more smooth, I wanted to make sure that he room was special just for him so it was time to decorate (and I was nesting and I took it out on his big boy room). I love how it all turned out. Here are some pictures:

The Bed

Above the bed is James’ family tree (not the circle one that I made originally, I wanted to do one with lines that would match his decor more. Up close view in another post). Also are the six canvas pieces that I made to match the bedding. I got the idea on pinterest and really liked how they turned out. The stool helped him get up on the bed (after we put the box springs on the bed, it was too tall for him on his own, but the box springs, and the bed rail keep him in bed after he wakes up).

Canvas and Family tree

Bookshelf and toys

I didn’t want to buy a new dresser and the one we had didn’t match very well, so we hid it in the closet and use the green buckets for diapers, jammies, extra blankets and jackets. He has a teddy bear, his jungle truck, a piggy bank and the Illustrated Stories of the Book of Mormon (he LOVES those books). The frame above the bookshelf is going to be filled with pictures of his aunts, uncles, cousins and us! We also found a beautiful picture of the Savior holding hands with a little blond boy by Greg Olsen, a picture of the temple and a picture of President Monson.

The Temple, the Savior and the Prophet

It turned out a little high on the wall for his little eyes but he still takes notice of it (he pointed at President Monson today and said “bumpa” (how he says grandpa)…opps, we’ll have to work on that).

On the side of the room (where I stood to take the pictures) is just the door and a closet. So nothing interesting to see over there.

He loves his room and understands that it is HIS room. I love going in to get him in the morning and finding him snuggled up in his bed, just waiting for me. I love snuggling with him and watching his eyes open and close as he fights going to sleep. And although I know that I’m going to miss him being my baby, right now I love doing these things for him to help him grow up a little tiny bit.

In May, we bought a new bed for our anniversary. We upgraded from a queen sized to a king, thus rendering all of our sheets, comforters and quilts useless. I had some bedding picked out that I loved, but it wasn’t available yet, so I decided to wait until it was released. When it became available I discovered it was going to be over $700! (far too much than I wanted/am willing to spend on new bedding.) So the search began for bedding that I loved. Until then, we bought some inexpensive sheets and used a pile of blankets, or just the fitted sheet and nothing else because it was summer, and I was pregnant.

As fall descended upon us, I realized we needed new bedding because it was soon going to be necessary to use more than just a sheet. And since I am no longer pregnant, I don’t have any sort of built in heater and I really need a comforter. So the search became more intense.

Searching online and in stores, I finally found one that I loved at JC Penney – awesome (and it was on sale — double awesome) – and made my purchase. When it arrived I was so excited. I wanted to put it on my bed that day, but didn’t have any sheets that matched (it is a 10 piece bed set with a comforter, 4 decorative pillows, two king shams, two euro shams and a bed skirt, but no sheets) and needed to make a trip to the store.

Finally, I had everything that I needed and was ready to make my room beautiful once again. I wanted it to look like the picture, so I even pulled out the ironing board (don’t even ask me the last time I pulled out the ironing board. I can’t remember. We never iron anything around here, so getting the ironing board out is a big deal).

Turns out, I don’t iron because I don’t know how or am just not good at it.

I started with the bed skirt. It was really wrinkly from being folded up in the bag, so I read the instructions and set the iron on low according to the care instructions. It is a type of fabric I’m not familiar with, so I didn’t want to burn or melt it. I’ve done that before with the iron.

I sprayed the bed skirt and ran the iron over it. Nothing happened. I tried again and the wrinkles persisted. I thought maybe I needed to let the iron warm up more, so I took a short break then tried again. The wrinkles wouldn’t budge. Sprayed it again and tried more. Still nothing.

Fine. The bed skirt wouldn’t be ironed. No one would see the wrinkles in it anyway.

Then I realized I needed to move the mattress to put on the bed skirt… hmmm. It’s pretty heavy and Bryan wasn’t home, but I’m tough and knew I could do it. I lifted and pushed aiming for the bedroom wall. Pushing, lifting, grunting and crawling across the box springs I finally got it propped up against the wall and set to put the bed skirt over the box springs. After I had it all positioned I just needed to put the mattress back. Placing the mattress back on would be far easier than lifting it off, so why not rotate the mattress at the same time. It’s good to rotate mattresses every once in a while, right? Right, but probably not when you are trying to put on a bed skirt.

In the process of lining the mattress up with the box springs and rotating it, there was only inches of the bed skirt left showing on either side of the mattress.

just a smig

inches...

I tugged, pulled, lifted, tucked and tried everything to pull the rest of the bed skirt out. Then gave up.

There is currently a bed skirt on  my bed, but if you look, you won’t see it because I gave up just tucked the whole thing between the mattresses. Who needs a bed skirt anyway?

Then it was on to the sheets. I had washed them the night before and left them in the dryer, so they were pretty wrinkled too. Still having high hopes of the bed looking just like the picture I thought I would iron the sheets too. But not all of them. That would be way too much. Not the fitted sheet and only the top part of the flat sheet that you see at the top of the bed.

I knew I could turn the iron much hotter for sheets (we were taught how to iron by ironing pillow cases when we were younger) and knew that I could get the wrinkles out of sheets. At the top of the sheets the is a fold in the fabric and a decorative element, but the problem was that the sheets aren’t the highest quality and I’m not sure the decorative element and fold were quite alined when they were sowed, so I ended up ironing creases into the sheets (I’m sticking with the sheets were defective and not that I just am terrible at ironing).

Finally finishing, I ironed the pillow cases and set to work putting the whole bed together.

The finished product!

(Please excuse all the random junk on my nightstand. I refuse to get out of bed at night when I feed the baby, so everything I need is within arms’ reach.)

At this point, even though it was snowing outside and we hadn’t turned on our heater yet, I was sweating. But I love how it turned out and I love the colors in our bedroom and it so warm and wonderful. There are a couple too many pillows, and I knew Bryan would mock me for that, but after moving the euro pillows to the family room (the two in the very back) it doesn’t seem so over-pillowed and silly and I love love love it.

I’m still a little sad about the crazy $700 bedding, but I am so happy with the final product that this really was worth the wait.

Next: on to adding a cool accent wall behind the bed, with paintable wallpaper, a shelf and blue paint. It’s gonna be awesome.

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers…

Malachi 4:6

I love the idea of having a family tree in the home to always remember the wonderful heritage we come from. However, I don’t really like how family trees often look.

Then one day, I came across this cute shop: My Tree and Me and I fell in love. I loved their modern take on the family tree and wanted to do something like it (but not pay $120).

So I decided to make one of my own. Originally, I had thought that I was just stealing the idea straight from them (I saw the site, forgot to bookmark it, made one of my own, then found the site again), but it turned out that my idea was different that the specific trees they sell.

Here it is:

I love love love the way it turned out. I found a frame at Ikea that is 20×20 so I just need to get this printed and it will be a great addition to my living room. (I thought it was a little bit weird to post the first and last names of all my family on an open blog … I try to be safe about what I put up here … so I changed out the names for this post, but in the real tree it has all the first, middle and last names for James’ five generations.)

I toyed around with the idea of including more information like birth and death dates for each person (as applicable) but decided not to for right now. I just love how clean and simple it is. Maybe in the future I’ll expand it a little bit more, but for now I am very happy.

Now I just have to come up with another idea for baby #2. (who still doesn’t have a name. Guess we shouldn’t have used up all our grandpa names with james…)

We looked into shows in Las Vegas and thought about other places we could go.

Or… We could stay around here and celebrate by going to dinner or something and buy a new mattress.

In the end, after many long debates, we decided to get a new mattress. We found on last Saturday and decided to get it now. We upgraded from a queen to a king and it is WONDERFUL!

The first night we slept in it, Bryan climbed in bed and asked where I was. He reached over and touched my arm and said, “oh, there you are, at arms length away, just where I like you.” I laughed and laughed. We are not cuddly sleepers, we have to have our own space. The king bed does that so well we can both stretch out as much as we like and he still won’t be in my foot or elbow space…both of which are very important for me to have in order to sleep.

Our big problem is that we don’t have any bedding (we just bought a set of sheets and are using various blankets for right now).

I fell in love with this bedding that I saw on Apartment Therapy:

The post said that it is available at Bed, Bath and Beyond in stores but not online. So I looked in the stores here in Utah valley and had no success. I’ve checked online and it is nowhere to be found so now i have to decide if I should wait and hold out for the bedding that I know I love, or should I just go out looking for something else that I can love and buy that for our bedding instead?

Hmmm.

What do you think? I’m kind of picky about things like bedding, so it might be better for me to hold out. Technically, the whole bedding set is going to be my mothers day gift, so I would love to have it before mothers day.

Hmmm.

I subscribe to so many different blogs and things through my google reader and email newsletters. As I read through my reader items and emails, I use www.delicious.com to bookmark and keep all the things that I like and want to look at again later. I found a way that I can put it on my blog and kind of like it. I made it a page, so if you are bored and want to see some of the things that I’ve been looking at and loving online lately just click on “link love” in the pages list on my blog (right now it’s in the top right hand corner, but that may change if I change my theme). Or you can visit my delicious page.

Looking through all my saved bookmarks though, I just wish that real life could be as cute as the world seems online.

Maybe someday I’ll get there.

Mostly I love the blue ceiling and want to do it in my house… hmm. Which room to pick?

img from: apartment therapy

As much as I love skirts and own many of them though, I do not love hanging them up.  I’ve tried many different options for hanging skirts: skirt hangers, folding them over regular hangers, just folding them… I didn’t like any of them.  Really, it just all boiled down to the fact that I wanted a way to hang my skirts, keep them mostly wrinkle free and still be a lazy as possible (sad, I know).  Then one day I came up with a fantastic idea:

Small, light-weight hooks, made by 3M with the little removable sticky thing on the back.  I had an empty wall next to the door of my closet, stuck a bunch of these little hooks on the wall in rows and dun, dun, dun daaa-SKIRT WALL.

I kind of love it.

I put up the top row, then about a foot below that, staggered the other rows below it.  Using the tags inside the skirts they hang up very nicely and surprisingly stay pretty wrinkle-free. The best part is, after a long day of meetings and church, I can come home and slip the skirt off and hang it up. My skirts have no longer become a decoration for my floor.

I’m thinking of making a similar one for my purses, I just have to find the right wall.

We also rearranged the office just a little while ago to accommodate a new desk that we bought for Bryan.  I love my new space.  My desk is not looking right out the window, but when I turn I have a beautiful view of the park behind our house (before I had a wonderful view of the power lines and the church).  Here’s where I was before:

Here’s my new workspace now with the great new pictures above it.

I kind of LOVE my new space.  I think the pictures above the desk work so well.  After I take the time to make Bryan’s desk look better, then I’ll post pictures of our whole office.  Since both of us have our own computer and like our own space, we have two desks in our little office and it’s a little cramped, but I think we’ve done pretty good at making it look nice anyway.

Sometimes, I’m just so proud of my decorating skills…