Nursery ideas

From Etsy seller CarryOnCorps

Matt and I love the movies from Japanese animation Studio Ghibli. One of our favorites is a sweet little kids' movie called My Neighbor Totoro. It's about two little girls that move to the country with their dad. They befriend a forest spirit called Totoro, have adventures, and are generally just adorable. It's very different from a lot of American kids' movies in that it's rather quiet, slow-moving, and not a lot happens, but it's really cute and sort of comforting in a way, if that makes any sense.

Since it's hard to find Totoro things in America (unless you pay a zillion dollars to ship it from Japan, or buy custom things like the above Etsy piece), we're probably going to go for a more general "woodland scenes and animals" theme for the nursery with touches of Totoro and maybe other Studio Ghibli movies.







These little guys appear in a couple of the movies and have been translated as dust bunnies or soot sprites. Their actual name, susuwatari, means something like "wandering soot" or "pitch-black assistants" in Japanese. They're cute and funny and squeaky, and I might paint a handful of them in the corners of the nursery since they like quiet, dark spaces.

From Flickr user innocentcharmer

I want to paint a tree in the corner where the crib will go. (We got a crib the other day! Used, with a corner changing table, for $60 together! Both a light wood, though not the same wood, oh well.) I like the idea of painting the tree but cutting out fabric leaves and sticking them on with starch. (You can just peel them off and wipe down the wall when you're sick of them.) I don't think I'd do all these crazy colors and patterns, but maybe four or five different small prints all in green. I kind of like the idea of an aspen tree or two, since it seems very "Colorado" to me.

As for the rest of the walls, I'm not sure. We might leave them white. We might paint them a light color, possibly. I've even toyed with the idea of a very simple mural: green grassy hills with a blue sky and clouds on the ceiling.

One thing we do know is that there needs to be a geek mobile over the crib! Matt always doodles something on my to-go box when we go out to eat. One night it was an X-Wing from Star Wars. Then he added, I think, the Star Trek Enterprise. I encouraged him to add other geeky spaceships including the TARDIS (Doctor Who), Serenity (Firefly), and maybe a couple others, and it turned into a mobile! Somehow, this will happen. Probably we'll buy little replica figures and figure out how to string them all together. We might end up sculpting and painting a couple that are hard to find in a small size. It's very "us," and will start the baby out on the proper path to Geekdom.

We're not ready to actually do any of this yet, of course. The crib and changing table are still all in pieces. The upstairs bedroom, currently the guest room, still needs cleaned out a lot more and the futon and shelves need to be moved downstairs. Hopefully once I'm done with school (2.5 weeks!!!), I will have time (and energy) to devote to this. If we can just get it emptied, that will be a huge motivation to start painting, getting furniture, etc.

If you have any nursery suggestions, decorating or otherwise, I'd love to see them in the comments!