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| Welcome! |
Come on in. The hydrangeas have been picked over by tiny fingers. You can see a leaf on the floor by the vase, and Stanley the Squirrel has been unceremoniously tossed under the bench. See also: spit up on the rug I noticed after I took the photo. Overall this space has stood up pretty well to baby. Connor loves using the bench to pull up on and makes a few stops a day in this area to just investigate things.
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| Dining room? |
The dining room is to the left. You can see it's been pretty much completely taken over by baby stuff and mess. The ladder shelf had to go (too unstable and offered too many ways for little fingers to get pinched) and the pack n play hangs out there instead. Crazy vinyl tablecloth is under the booster seat to save our rug from further damage caused by flung utensils and food. The curtains remain closed almost constantly because, yes, that is a breast pump you see on the kitchen table. The dining table is covered with a weird mix of baking dishes that need to be relocated to an as-yet-undetermined less baby-accessible location, and printer mess (mine needed to be replaced about a week ago).
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| More mess. |
I've managed to baby proof most of the hutch, but it still isn't really styled. You can see the random extension cord snaked over the top instead of hidden under the hutch. Fortunately Connor can only reach the bottom two shelves for now, so I've moved all of my table linens down there and some infrequently used baking supplies corralled in rattan baskets. At this point Connor isn't tricky enough to pull the baskets off the shelves, and there's not enough clearance for him to pop the lids open. I'm guessing we'll need to redo it in a few months when he gets stronger, or we'll learn the joys of cleaning flour and corn starch out of carpet.
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| Kitchen! |
The rug that lives in front of the sink is in the wash, and there's a pile of baby feeding stuff to the left of the sink and a container of kitchen-specific baby "toys" on the right. Other than that our kitchen hasn't changed much (yes, of course we baby proofed all of the lower cabinets). It just doesn't get cleaned as well and as frequently. Pretty sure you'd see crumbs on our range and fingerprints on the fridge if you look close enough.
Here's the living room. It's covered in baby toys- the lower shelf under the TV, the box next to it, hiding in front of the grandfather clock, on the coffee table, on the side table (yes, baby likes to play with a foam roller), on the floor. Our TV has grown since last year; somehow Steve convinced me we needed a larger one. I find it to be way too large, but there's almost always Sesame Street or something similar going on it now, and Steve and I usually watch a show on Netflix while we eat dinner after Connor's gone down for the night. So even though I don't like the looks of it, it functions very well for our family's needs. Steve built risers for our couch in the fall because we had more and more difficulty getting off it safely with a baby in our arms as Connor got heavier and heavier. The risers are still raw wood, which looks terrible. We were thinking of covering them in leather, but right now they just look funny. We've also discussed getting a more baby-friendly coffee table, but for now we just supervise closely when Connor's around it. And frankly, he's skilled enough at pulling up and getting back down now that we don't really have to watch that closely. I also hit a new milestone in life: the spring decorations on top of the piano got left out so long last year that they are now season-appropriate again. I rearranged things a little bit using items that had to be moved off the bookshelf.
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| The hallway. |
Aside from the addition of a baby gate to separate Connor and the dogs when they're not being closely supervised, this looks almost the same.
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| Guest/baby bathroom. |
Our guest bath gets a lot of use these days. In reality, the tile doesn't look creamier than the tub, as it appears in this photo... the whites are very cohesive in person. You can see evidence of baby stuff in the shower (there are some toys on the tub floor as well). I'm happy to report that our DIY bathroom overhaul is holding up pretty well. Now that it's been complete for almost a year, there's a couple of areas on the bead board I'd like to recaulk, and we still haven't gotten the matching extended shower head. But both Steve and I have showered in here on occasion and we both think it's a very nice bathroom. The tile and shower curtain going all the way to the ceiling makes it feel much larger than it is.
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| Blurry nursery. |
I feel I need an extra apology for this blurry photo. There was a baby asleep in the crib when I took the photo, and he has super-sonic hearing for anything that sounds remotely metallic (like a camera shutter) so I didn't dare take more photos for fear of waking him. This room is wreck at the moment. The crib has been lowered twice in a month and I haven't bothered to reattach the crib skirt. The rolling cart is holding outgrown odds and ends and there's a giant pile of additional outgrown items behind it on the floor and on the other side of the chair (hey rock n play). The changing area looks a little worse for wear as well. The paint chip orbs I made fell apart not long after Connor arrived on the scene. We hung a Star Wars alphabet poster from our friend Rachael, which Connor loves so much that he regularly knocks the bottom part of the frame down. He also loved the mirror so much that he figured out how to pull it off the wall. So Steve nailed the frame to the wall. And Connor pulled it down again. So now it's just a blank wall full of nail holes. The bins in the top of the closet have been working pretty well for storing outgrown and not-yet-grown-into clothes, but it's been tricky to keep up with them since Connor has changed clothing sizes 7 times in 8 months. I feel like I am constantly rotating clothes into and out of his dresser changing table.
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| The office. |
I rarely use our office anymore. During the day, the dogs get free run in this area and the back half of the hallway. We removed my leather chair (it was getting too saggy to type comfortably from it anyway) and replaced it with a rolling office chair that I had to bring home from work last June. Our reading area has been taken down to make room for an extra dog cushion and more floor space for puppies to run around on. My side of the desk is covered with random projects I haven't gotten around to doing for several months as well as our new gargantuan workhorse of a printer. I also need to rethink my paperwork filing system because having an extra person in our family has created a shocking amount of additional records. And because I know somebody will wonder, the green thing and the bowl on the floor are the dogs' food bowls.
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| The master bedroom. |
I actually have some *pretty* photos of the progress on refreshing our bedroom and making it less precious, but this is what it has looked like for the majority of the last 4 months or so. Bed unmade because of early baby wake-ups. Connor's doorway jumper in a pile on the floor for easy access when I just need him to hold still for 10 minutes so I can get ready for work without worrying about him. Vitamins and wrinkled sheets and cords galore. Maybe the pretty photos will show up in another blog post one day.
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| Master bath. |
First off let me say that our linens are not dirty like they appear to be in this photo. I should've flicked the lights on before I snapped the photo, but I didn't, so you get an icky photo. I hate it when towels look janky on towel rods. Our towels have looked janky for months now. Twice a week we get new towels out, and they look pretty for the duration of your shower, and then they get used and flipped onto the towel rod as fast as possible and look janky again. There is actually less stuff piled on our bathroom counter than there normally is. And not pictured here is the aftermath of a leak we had to our bathroom skylight in January. After 2 tries we finally were able to find the exact source of the leak and stop it, but we've got a ton of drywall that will need to be replaced above the lights in this photo.
I didn't take any photos of the exterior or garage because sleeping baby, so here's the quick update. The garage doesn't "look bad," but good luck if you need to find anything in there. It's a hodgepodge of tools, paint stuff, lawn things, baby stuff, things waiting to be gifted-sold-donated-returned-rehomed, exercise equipment, classroom supplies, and boxes. Outside, our paint job is holding up really well. There's a couple of trim spots around doors and windows that could use recaulking and a fresh coat of paint, but otherwise things look good. I *think* all of the stuff I planted in the front yard and back yard overwintered. And the bleeding hearts and coral bells on the north side of the house not only overwintered but are thriving (the ferns and everything in the window boxes were not so lucky). Our lawn is a terrible wreck. This was our third winter in this house and the mildest one in the PNW in years, so our lawn is a bumpy, mossy, dandelion-infested pit right now. The faucet at the back of the house is still working great but we haven't gotten around to fixing the one at the front of the house.
So there's a peek into our house with an 8 month old in the mix. Overall I feel like we are becoming a little smarter about what makes sense for us to have in our house with a baby here too, and we are definitely not pushing as hard to do things just for the sake of making it pretty. What changed about your home once you had a baby?
