We went into the pediatrician’s office this morning for Nora’s ear “recheck” appointment from her latest ear infection diagnosis two weeks ago. I had an inkling that things were not going to go well.
Sadly, we’ve gotten pretty good at diagnosing Nora’s ear infections on our own, just by observing her behavior and her general demeanor. She’s usually not miserable, but she’s just not herself. A little moody. With a short fuse. Occasional rubbing of the ears. Interrupted sleep.
That last one has always been a tell-tale sign. On Saturday night, she was up–wide awake–for three hours in the middle of the night. Fun times, I tell you.
Anyway, the doctor took a look at one ear and sighed, “That one is a mess.” And then she looked in the other one, “That one’s not good either.”
Let’s back up here. December 22: Left ear. January 9: Right ear. January 23: Both ears. The last two were diagnosed at appointments that were supposed to be “rechecks”–in other words, appointments to confirm that infections had cleared. Our poor girl has not been ear infection free since well before Christmas.
The kicker this time was that she had been on Omnicef, which is considered a broad spectrum (a.k.a. strong) antibiotic–because amoxicillin hadn’t been doing the job. Now, it appears Omnicef isn’t working, either. So, the doctor opted to give Nora injectable antibiotics.
INJECTABLE. Antibiotics.
They’re the big guns, y’all. Not cool.
We have to go back tomorrow to have her ears reevaluated, because apparently, these antibiotics are so good that we should see marked improvement in just 24 hours. At that point, the doctor will decide if she needs another round. Rinse and repeat for Wednesday. Poor little Nora is going to be traumatized, I fear. Needless to say, she was not thrilled with the two needles that were stuck into her chubby little thighs this morning.
We also walked out with an ENT referral. We’re at the end of our rope with this stuff. We want our baby to get better. We’ve looked into chiropractors, and it is just not a feasible solution for us right now. We’ve considered the dairy sensitivity, and will be talking to our doctors about that a bit more, but overall, we’re just happy to have the appointment with the ENT (next week) to get a formal evaluation of her condition, and go from there. This isn’t the way we wanted this to turn out, but we just want to put an end to this endless sea of ear infections, trips to the doctor, and antibiotics.
Baby steps.
AKA the post in which I show you how we turned a formal living room into a playroom.
Our new house was built in the 1970s, so of course, we have a smaller, cozier family room AND a formal living room. When we first looked at the house, then bought it and moved in, we figured the living room would be kept quite empty for a while. Buying furniture for a room that we didn’t plan to spend much time in was pretty low on the list of priorities when it came to spending our money.
At first, the room was an “overflow” room. And when we were ripping down drywall and the family room was under construction, we had all of our family room furniture in the living room. It was a mess. But once we had things under control, we moved everything into its rightful place and the living room was left with… a toybox. So it became a makeshift playroom for Nora.
Over time, we began to embrace the idea of a first floor playroom. And finally, we decided that if we were going to make it a playroom, we should put the effort into “decorating” it as such. We started collecting pieces for the formal living room playroom, and now, we are finally done.
It’s funny, because when you walk through our front door, this is actually the first room you see. I suppose it is a testament to the current state of our lives. Hi, we are parents to a young child. :)
The color on the walls is Sherwin Williams Sea Salt. We actually chose it (and painted it on the walls!) before we even really knew what we were going to do with the room. Looking back, that probably wasn’t the right approach, but I think it turned out to be the perfect color. I love it. It’s a lovely blue-gray color and really makes this room light and airy.
This is a DIY magnet board we made out of sheet metal for Nora (thanks to Pinterest for the inspiration).
Curtain rod and curtains are from JCPenney.
Table by Tot Tutors, purchased at Toys ‘R’ Us from Santa’s workshop. :) We have really been impressed with the little table so far. The pieces are nice and sturdy, the colors are great, and Nora loves it. Win-win-win.
Playmat by Tadpoles, purchased at Amazon.com. We bought three of them to make a mat of this size. This has been great for us, too. For a few months, we sat right on the hardwoods to play with Nora in the then-empty “playroom,” and it was really rough on the tailbone (especially one that I swear is permanently damaged by childbirth). This makes things a bit more comfy!
Cube shelf and fabric drawers from Target. This was one of our latest additions within the last several weeks, and it has really helped to complete the room. To have additional, smaller storage to supplement the toy box has been great. Books, smaller toys–they’re all easily accessible to Nora, but they now have a place.
Lamp and lampshade from Target. Art from Etsy. There are dozens of variations of the “playroom rules” floating around Pinterest and Etsy, so there are certainly options. And, subway art is fairly easy to DIY, too. However, this PDF file was only $10 and I figured it was more than worth it for the time I would’ve spent to try to design something I liked equally as much. I had it printed at Staples for like $2, and bought the frame at Michaels.
More toys organized, but easily accessible to Nora. We also decided to hang her cake smash collage (want a better look? check out this post) in here.
Ah, the alphabet wall. This thing was a labor of love, and totally deserves its own post–so be on the lookout for more details on this project within the next few days. In short, we had a huge wall to contend with, and debated going in a few different directions. But in the end, we fell in love with an alphabet wall I had pinned on Pinterest… the rest is history.
Toy box is by my dad. :)
I know this type of thing probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Like I said, this is one of the first things people see as they come into the front door of our house! A lot of people would prefer to have playrooms that can be hidden behind closed doors, and toys that can be tucked away. But for us, it was about creating something functional. Instead of furnishing and decorating a room that would be rarely used, we went with something that is utilized on a daily basis.
In this room, Nora can play with all of her toys just a few steps away from us while we’re making dinner. When we have company over (almost all of whom have children of their own), our kids can play together in the next room while we enjoy some adult conversation. We envision that this room will get a lot of use during our years with young kids. At some point, when they’re a little older, we’ll move the playing into the finished part of our basement, and this room will transform into something else. Until then, our little girl enjoys it every day. See?
Making sure to come full circle–here are the “before” pics. First, with the sellers things:
And then on the day we moved in:
And one more time, here’s our after:
Overall, this was a really fun room to work on. It took some time, but mostly because we just collected items little by little. Once we decided to truly “finish” it, everything came together very quickly. I wish the kitchen could be this easy!
You’d think that with the (seemingly) hundreds of baby gates on the market, it would be easier to find one that actually works and fits in the spot you want to put it. But we’re not having much luck, and we have an increasingly mobile and curious toddler who thinks that climbing the stairs is the most.fun.activity.EVER.
Our biggest problem lies in our banisters. The one at the bottom of the stairs is pretty tall, so we can’t find a gate tall enough to be able to line up the tension rods with the flat parts of it. So we figured we’d have to get one of those banister kits to adapt the best/tallest gate we could find–a Dream Baby Extra Tall security gate–but then we noticed that when we use the tension rod against our sorta-loose banister, the tension was actually forcing the banister over to the side a bit, causing some of the molding surround the banister to rip apart. NOT GOOD.
The other issue with the bottom of the stairs is that I guess you’re supposed to put the gate on the bottom stair, as opposed to the floor? If that’s the case, we’ve got bigger problems since we have a pretty thick and cushy carpet as a runner, making the surface area unlevel when you go from left to right.
For the top of the stairs, we have the same type of banister, but it’s a bit shorter. We bought a Summer Infant Sure and Secure Extra Tall gate, because it was one of the only ones I found that was (hopefully) the right height AND could be hardware mounted (a safety requirement for top-of-the-stairs placement). We don’t have it in our hands yet, because our local Babies ‘R’ Us and Toys ‘R’ Us stores were out of stock, so we had to have my sister-in-law pick it up for us in the city where she goes to college, and we won’t see her again until Saturday. But since the banister is a little loose upstairs, too, I’m nervous that this won’t work, either. When you hardware mount, does it still require tension against the surfaces you’re mounting on?
Our trim molding is not the easiest thing to deal with either, as it also semi-interferes with mounting–both tension and hardware styles. Fun.
And then there’s part of me that is thinking we should just save our money and buy a cheap, removable-on-a-daily-basis gate that we can somehow rig at the bottom of the stairs, and just very carefully supervise (like we have been) whenever we’re upstairs. At what age do kids generally learn how to go down stairs safely? When are they old enough to start teaching them to scootch down on their bellies, backwards?
For downstairs, if we can’t figure out a bottom-of-the-stairs solution, our only other option is to put a gate in the doorway to our kitchen, then put a (very wide, and probably very expensive) gate across the opening into the playroom, effectively blocking off our entire foyer. This is less appealing to me because I feel like the gates will be more “in your face” this way, as opposed to being relatively inconspicuous in our stairway.
What do you think? Any suggestions for us based on our photos? Do you live in a “gated community,” or do you let your kids roam free? If you do the former, what is the system you’ve found works best for you? If the latter, how on earth do you keep your kids away from stairs and/or watch them every second?
We moved into our new house in August. Five months later, and I’ve shown you very little of it. You’ve probably caught glimpses here or there, but I haven’t openly documented how much this place has changed.
It sort of makes me feel unaccomplished, like we haven’t truly finished anything. But we’re actually working on putting the final touches on a few rooms right now, so I hope to be sharing some official before and after pics soon.
But first, I thought I’d start by showing you the room in our house that is next up on our list of projects. It’s arguably the most important room in the house. And, oddly enough, it’s the room I currently hate the most. It’s received very little cosmetic love and attention thus far.
That room? It’s the kitchen.
Behold: Photos of our ugly-ass kitchen, from the day after we closed on the house.
Yes, that is an ungodly amount of z-brick. Yes, those are parquet floors.
Yes, that is shoe molding being used as crown molding.
Yes, the z-brick even goes behind the refrigerator. Lucky us.
Oh, and YES, that is rosebud wallpaper, with a heart border, all of which was just installed in–wait for it–2009.
And let’s not pass up the opportunity to admire the wooden heart valance/shelf thingy up above the sliding glass door.
*sigh* We have our work cut out for us, don’t we?
A few things have changed. We couldn’t rip down that wallpaper fast enough, and the heart shelf/valance thing was an early casualty. We also tore out the z-brick that surrounded the dishwasher. We moved our laundry from the basement to that gigantic oversized pantry (there were already laundry hookups in there). But then we got overwhelmed and distracted with other things, so the kitchen is just in a state of… ugly. Unfinished ugly.
In September/October, we ripped our family room ceiling and walls down to the studs and put up new drywall (with help from my dad, and our friends Emily and Pete). After that monster of a project, we were beaten down. So, we took a break from big projects, choosing instead to tackle things like painting and window treatments and replacing all of our hollow wooden interior doors with six-panel slab doors. And then we got through the busy holidays.
Now? Now, it’s January, it’s a new year, and we are ready for a project. A BIG project.
We are preparing to tackle that beast of a kitchen. To rid ourselves of z-brick forever, we have to (temporarily) remove all of the upper cabinets, the countertops, and a couple of the base cabinets in order to rip the upper portion of the walls down to the studs. Then, we’ll put up new drywall, and tape/mud/sand it all. We also have plans to paint the cabinets, install a tile backsplash, replace some of the fixtures, and… replace the floors.
I’m not going to lie to myself this time; this is going to take a while. But instead of dropping off the face of the earth and stopping in to blog only occasionally with “OMG WE’RE SO BUSY, MY HOUSE IS A HELLISH MESS, I’M GOING TO DIE” posts, I figure that I’ll try to keep you all updated on where we are in the process. You know, so you can live in kitchen renovation hell right along with us. :)
Right now, we’re finishing up the research/planning stages, but we hope to start to buy materials in the next few weeks, and finally begin making progress (DEMO!!) in early February. We’re somewhat intimidated and are still in search of a little help (Bueller?) but it has to be done! Living without a kitchen is never fun, and living without a kitchen with a toddler is like… have I used the word hell yet?
And so the countdown begins…
Have any of you tackled a big DIY kitchen renovation? Anyone have any experience with removing z-brick? How about (safely, temporarily) removing countertops without damaging them? Anyone just want to sympathize/empathize with my ugly kitchen woes? :)
Nora has a thing for making sure objects are in the “right” spot.
When she plays, she makes her share of messes, but a lot of times, she’ll pick up after herself–because she likes putting things away as much as she likes taking things out. Sometimes, she’ll be playing in the cupboards in the kitchen and the next thing I know, I look down and there is no sign of her having been there at all. I have to a double take and make sure I’m not going crazy–she really WAS just playing there, right?
She was; she just cleaned up all of the evidence.
Nora was given the Fisher-Price Little People Zoo for Christmas, and when Michael first opened it and put it all together for her, he put the gorilla in the tree swing. Now, Nora can’t handle it if the gorilla is NOT in the tree swing. If she walks over and finds him anywhere else in the zoo, she immediately moves him to the swing, then will often just walk away again. It’s like–as long as the gorilla is in his place, her job there is done.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, this is what it looks like when someone–AHEM!–tries to put your lens cap back on while you’re busy taking her picture. Because, you know, the correct “home” for a lens cap is–you guessed it–on the end of a lens. God forbid that it’s lying on the floor somewhere; that’s a situation that needs to be immediately rectified.
All of this is hilarious and adorable. I get a huge thrill out of this behavior, because it demonstrates just how observant she is and how her brain is sucking things in like a little sponge. My kid is SMART, y’all. And as her parent, it’s so fun to watch her learn before my very eyes.
After all, we all have some OCD tendencies, don’t we? I could name a few of my own. How about your kids? Do you notice that there are things they HAVE to have a certain way?
About
I'm Heather. I'm 33 and have been married to Michael for seven years. Together, we have two beautiful little girls we love more than anything, and a miniature dachshund who drives us crazy. I'm a full-time working mom who has very little time for my own "stuff" these days, like home improvement, cooking/baking, cake decorating, and photography. Despite the team not making the playoffs since 1999, I'm STILL a Buffalo Bills fan, which I think speaks to my loyalty AND sense of humor. I can't wait to pick up the pace with travel again some day... you know, when we're done being ruled by tiny fists. Welcome to my blog.
