They grow up so fast!

You hear that whole "they grow up so fast" thing all the time. And when your kids are little people say it to you all the time. Little old ladies come up to you to peek at your baby and then they leave with that parting advice "enjoy them, they grow up so fast", "enjoy them while they're small, they're gone before you know what happened". I remember being sort of annoyed when people would say this. Especially if I were in the grocery store with a 7 year old a VERY rambunctious 2 year old and an infant. I would kind of be thinking "lady...at this point I'll be GLAD if that's true, I think you've forgotten what it's like to have little kids!".

But actually now when I look at moms with little babies and toddlers I think the exact same thing. I just don't say it because I know it's super obnoxious. And I don't want to be that obnoxious old woman. But moms in their 20s and 30s with little kids have no idea how quickly they'll be a mom in the 40s with no little kids. Like it feels like it was 2 years ago when I had little kids. But that can't be true when my youngest is almost 14. But see you can really never explain this to anyone. You just can't. Because I swear when you have really tiny kids time just seems to meander and sometimes even dragggggg on and on (especially if you're up all night with a fussy baby). But then they start school and before you know it you're worrying about the SAT's and you can't figure out how high school seemed like I looong time when you were a teen, but suddenly, when it's your own child, it seems to go way too fast.

Am I a little melancholy about this? Well, I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I wouldn't trade where I'm at in my life now for a life filled with diaper changes and bottles. I really really would not. And I remember the first family vacation we took when no one was in diapers and there was no stroller involved. That's a good trip! And I have really enjoyed every single stage my kids have been in with a few tiny exceptions (Brennan at age 2, Holden at 13/14, Jordan has been perfect so far...). I really feel like I've made the most of every age they have been. And I hope I can keep figuring out a way to do that - even though they are all getting older, I really hope that I can still make the most of the new stages and ages they'll be. I don't want to be one of those people who always looks wistfully at the past as though they've left their best days behind. Those people are always kind of depressing. But you know, it's hard not to have the teeniest bit of angst when you realize your youngest child is about to start high school and so you only have about 4 more years with any kids in the house.

Anyway...I am taking the two younger kids on a vacation this week and I'm looking forward to spending some time away with them. I am so blessed to really enjoy my kids. They are funny and fun and I really do like being around them.

When my kids were tiny I was pretty limited in what I could do to decorate their rooms. I did a few things, but my budget didn't really allow for anything extravagant or expensive or extensive in scope. I wish I could have had the money back then to do some of the cool things I've seen lately in regards to kids rooms. So many fun ideas out there now.

So as I leave my computer behind for about a week, I leave you with some of my favorite images of kid's and babies rooms. And I leave you with some advice:

Enjoy your kids, whatever stage of life you are in. Tiny or grown ups or in between, they'll always be your babies.

I love all these images I have found lately which creatively explore how to handle a bedroom made for 3 or more children.

Love the gray with the pops of color

That's like a homemade mobile. A great idea. I saw another one this week where they cut out cute paper and did something similar.

genius genius genius idea for cheap and creative minimalist artwork!

I just super much love turquoise with red

I'm not really fooling myself here, I know this is a pricey room. But the color scheme is a good one to steal.

Love the turqoisey blue with the bold yellow.

This is that tricky redish pinkish hue. Some people are calling it guava. Or honeysuckle. But this is a little more red than that. I dig it. Great idea blowing up the photos too.

another genius solution

I just love the colors.

Love the stripes

Same idea as above, except hands instead of feet. I can't get over how easy and cute these are.

That head board is KILLER cool!

I don't usually go in for such soft colors, but I love this nursery.

Orange Blossoms In The Air

I love it this time of year in Phoenix. I just started smelling the Orange blossoms on Friday. So for a little while, it will smell delicious outside all the time. Especially in our part of Phoenix where there are so many citrus trees. Our neighborhood, once upon a time, was old citrus groves and most of the homes still have the trees left from the groves (well, at least some). In fact, down the street from me is still a portion of that old grove in tact. It's zoned agricultural in fact.

So this time of year I get to thinking about how cool it is that I live somewhere that I can pick my own lemons in my back yard. When I was a kid growing up in chilly Idaho, that was an unthinkable thought! (of course, in Idaho, in my backyard, I had delicious raspberries every summer, and that's not possible here...there are always trade offs in life.)

Which leads me to thoughts of Orange Decor. I have really been loving Orange for a couple of years now. I don't actually have any orange in the house, but I really think if I were to do a total change of anything in the decor of the main part of my home, I would probably trade in my red for orange. I'm still not really sick of the colors I have though, so no change yet. But in my office that I'm going to re-model, I'm considering Orange as the main accent color in there - maybe an orange desk or chair even. We'll see. Anyway, I do love it though and I think there are a lot of good items out there right now in Orange. I just think it looks very refreshing!

So here's some orange inspiration for you:

Finally Finished - Latest Project!

I really wanted to finish this way before now but it just wasn't happening. Remember when I first announced this project and I had some ideas, well you can go click on that link to read about it, or maybe this photo will remind you of the horrible blue I was dealing with before:

Anyway, I had to re-think several of my ideas and my dad solved one problem for me (the closet was full of storage and the closet never worked very well for clothes, my dad basically re-built it while he was in town and that totally solved my problem there, then I culled down the storage and moved some of it to the smaller bedroom, which will become Holden's when he gets home...that will be one of my next projects)

So here are the after photos, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out considering I had to work with the blue carpet. I decided not to go as dark with the paint as I had been planning and went gray instead of black or charcoal. I think it was best. The photos were taken in the afternoon when there is a lot of light in that room, on a not so great camera, so there are a lot of sun spots on the shots.

I knew with the gray walls and the blue carpet I had to figure out some way to pull it all together, and Brennan was pretty set on this bed. It's a low (platform style) bed like I had planned on but the headboard was different than I expected. Later, I realized it matched the wood in the dresser anyway, so I incorporated a few beige items into the decor and trim. Then I added the green and still hinted at the blue. I like the way it turned out.

I think the gray we chose ended up working with both the carpet, and the blue lights and fan, which I also didn't want to have to deal with replacing.

See how my dad totally made this a useable closet again? Thanks dad. There are no closet doors so I hung black curtains that can be pulled closed.

Then I added some original art work that we put together - I might add a little more later, but for now I think we're finished.

I also had to decide if I wanted to keep the stencil behind the door Holden had done a long time ago. He took a photo of a little girl at the beach in california years ago, then he blew it up into a stencil and had stencil'd it on the backside of the bedroom door. So it's a completely original Holden Hays artwork. In the end, I didn't have the heart to paint over it, so I painted around it and left the hot pink. Brennan wanted to british flag hung (it cracked me up when I was hanging it...it says "made in the USA" on the back of it. So apparently, we don't make many things here in the US, but we make british flags...

I'm so glad to be done! On to the next project.

see green, sea blue...or was that sea green, see blue?

The current song playing on my blog is by this singer I just stumbled upon at the movie I reviewed in my last entry (Happythankyoumoreplease). And a lot of times that happens - I'll find music I really like in a movie, and then I'll come home and try to find the soundtrack or the movie score. This movie was tricky, because as far as I can tell, they have not put out an official soundtrack for the film, anyway - her name is Jaymay and she has some beautiful stuff on itunes if you care to go looking. But I just randomly chose this song for the blog because it fit my mood at the time (if you're reading this months later and now what happens to be playing is Aerosmith or something crazy...just know, I change the music frequently and it usually matches my current mood, sorry for the confusion...) Anyway!

This isn't really even a post about music - although now I guess it sort of is, because I've spent a paragraph explaining the music. :) What it was really about was mood. And lately I'm in a green and a blue mood. I keep finding all these rooms and all this decor stuff I really like in mostly blue or green. So it's kind of synchronistic - this song and the decor. Also moodiness because I find that sometimes I am in a kind of melancholic bluesy kind of mood and then outside right now in Phoenix it is so SPRING and that makes me think more of green - and green is a happy mood for me. Maybe this post is really about me being a little frickin' MOODY.

Whatever.

Go buy or listen to some music by Jaymay, you'll thank me later. In the meantime, here are some inspiring rooms in some purdy colors.

(oh also...gosh this post is so ADHD isn't it? Sorry...digression for a moment, but lately a couple of people have told me that they like the blog and that they have looked at it while insomniac in the middle of the night - if you're one of those people looking right now "Hi", sorry about the inability to sleep - Me too sometimes, and it's not fun is it?...I've found one of the best ways to fall asleep is to start decorating a room in your head so go try that after you've looked around here for a while if you feel like it...and also, "Thanks" to the people who tell me they like the blog. The same few people tend to comment here a lot and most of them are personal friends, but it's nice when I occasionally see someone in person and they mention something they liked that they read or saw here - or I find out someone who used to know me stumbled upon this - or I get a random email from someone I really don't know at all who tell me nice things...all of those things are nice little happenstances)

Where was I?

Oh yeah

See green and see blue....

or sea green and sea blue

or something like that...