The Nursery

After looking at what felt like thousands of nursery sets when I found out I was pregnant, Mike and I finally found ones that we both liked for a boy and for a girl. So now that we finally know the sex of the baby we went to buy the bedding set. The only problem? It was going to cost us a whopping $300 plus! I'm not sure why, but back then it didn't seem so ridiculous, but when we got our pocket books ready, it did. So it was back to looking at hundreds of nursery sets. Mike and I agreed on trying to find one that was no more than $200. So I looked and looked and surprisingly there were new options that I hadn't seen before. I finally narrowed it down to two and had Mike help me make the final decision. The amazing thing about the set that we chose was that it was only $65! Of course it didn't come with all the things the other set came with, like a window valance, and a diaper stacker, and a mobile, but who needs all that stuff anyways? I am going to make a window valance with help from Mike's mom, and my mom got us an even nicer mobile than what came with the other set, and who really even uses a diaper stacker anyways? So in the end I am very pleased with the bedding set we chose, and Mike is very pleased he only had to dish out $65 for it!

The bedding set

I also found this great idea on pinterest (naturally) and copied it, but put our own little twist on it. 

From pinterest

And here's our spin on it:

The whole thing

It doesn't look all that hard to do right? Wrong. It took a lot of hard work to make that, but I'm pretty sure most people probably don't make it themselves. Mike and I made it out of scrap pieces of wood he had out in the barn. First we made our measurements and then we cut out quarter inch plywood in those dimensions and put three coats of white paint on it. Then we taped off equal sections and painted two coats of pink and waited for that to dry so we could tape off equal sections for the purple and then we painted two coats of purple and let that dry. Once everything was dry we took measurements for the trim which Mike cut out of some Cherry hardwood that we had leftover from another project. Then we cut those pieces and put angles on the edges of them, which was hard to cut. Then we sanded the crap out of them, stained them, varnished them and waited for them to dry. Once they were dry Mike planned down some old teak, which if you or I looked at would think was no good, but once Mike stripped off a couple layers it looked amazing. Then we traced the letters for the name that we picked out in the font that we both liked onto the teak and Mike cut those out. While he cut them out I sanded them down and once we were done with that we varnished them as well and waited for them to dry. Then we put the trim on the plywood and centered the letters in the white and glued them down. Then Mike put the hardware on the back of it so we could hang it up and we hung it above the crib in Audrey's room. Most people wouldn't be able to do all of that on their own, but since Mike is into woodworking he had all the tools and machines we needed. If we didn't have all those things I'm sure this project would have costed us a lot of money, but the only thing we had to buy was the pink and purple paint, so all in all it cost us roughly $10 to make. 

It's a...

So we had our little gender reveal party today and it went very well. We had pink and blue balloons, drinks, table clothes, plates, and plastic ware. 

Balloons

The cake

The final votes

The girls

The boys

The boys won the vote 14 : 9, but in the end the girls won! 

And it's a girl!!

The drinks

So, throughout my entire pregnancy I've been thinking it was a boy and so has Mike, but that changed after our ultrasound. The ultrasound tech had us look away while she was looking in between the baby's legs, but when she told us that we could look back I was pretty sure she was still focused in there and I didn't see anything in between the legs, so that's when I thought that it must be a girl. Now I'm no ultrasound technician, but I was pretty sure that's what she was looking at, but who knows, she was looking at the upper lip earlier during the ultrasound and I had no idea what in the world she was looking at. But I was right!

I never really cared either way, but once it came time to cut into that cake I was nervous. I had spent the past 9 days since having the ultrasound looking at little girl clothes and getting so excited; and I knew that if I cut into that cake and it was blue I was going to be a little disappointed. So I'm glad that when we cut into that cake it was pink. Now I can get the nursery ready and start buying those little girl clothes!