Nursery: Part 1

I've been working on the nursery for a few months now.  Just when I thought it was coming together, my husband decided it was time to add three more electrical outlets to the room (as there was only one).  He just finished this evening and I am just getting it back in order.  I started with the large IKEA bookshelf that is the main storage component in the room.  This particular shelf was bought more than 10 years ago, and has moved with me from at least 6 or 7 different apartments until it ended up in our first house.  There is a closet, but it's small and awkwardly shaped, and I figured that open shelves with bins were more suitable for tiny baby clothes.  I found the bins pictured below at IKEA as well, but more recently.  It was in the kid's section and seems to be a good size for onesies, booties, hats, bibs, etc...  I had a difficult time remembering what was in which bin, so I made little felt "labels" the I sewed onto the front reminding me what's in each bin.

 Above the bins of clothes are the many children's books I've collected and gotten as gifts.  My two favorite children's authors are Berkeley Breathed and Maira Kalman.  The former is probably best known for creating the character of Opus and the comic strip Bloom County.  However, more recently, he has written some wonderful children's books!  His book Goodnight Opus is a funny riff on Goodnight Moon and I love it even more.  My husband is also a fan of Breathed and Opus - that's his Opus stuffed animal on the top shelf.  I was introduced to Maira Kalman in college and used to love walking down to 57th Street Books in Hyde Park and reading her children's books when I was feeling blue.  Unfortunately, since then, a lot of them are out of print, so I started buying used library-bound copies.  (If her illustrations look familiar, she's done a lot of work in the New Yorker and had an illustrated column in the New York Times for awhile.

 The majority of the books - including almost all of the board books, were gifts.  I asked everyone that came to the baby shower to bring their favorite book.  In addition, many of my 6th grade students gave me books when they threw me their own baby shower.  It's great because a lot of them (or their parents) picked their favorites. I wasn't familiar with a lot of them and I still need to go through and read them all.

Don't you love this cute pink bookend?  It says "Dreams come true," which is a great thing for our daughter to remember.  I got it at Daiso, a terrific Japanese dollar store.  Although, I had to go to the one in Seoul to find it :-)  More about the nursery to come...