Thankfulness Days 12 and 13: My Kids Are Growing Up...

You hear me complain frequently here that I hate the fact that my kids are growing up. I try to make the most of every moment with them (it doesn't always work!), but there are some great perks of them growing up that we've noticed the past couple days:

Their taste buds change! Paige has been a picky eater, but now she loves new things: hot peppers, beans, and squash to name a few! She even will eat salad now. The trick? She cuts the pieces of lettuce up really tiny! Apparently she didn't like it because she was always getting the dressing all over her face. Who knew?!?

NO MORE DIAPERS!!!!!!!!! This may be premature, but I think Ryan is potty trained! Five out of the past six nights Ryan has been dry! We have been accident free since Friday morning, and that was only because he was a split second too late getting to the potty when he woke up. My budget is breathing a sigh of relief :)

Nate is learning to tie his shoes! One less thing for this momma to take care of :)

But one of my favorite things? I get to redecorate the finished portion of our basement!

Right now it looks like this:

Okay, so not exactly like that. The spider web on the floor was for a preschool activity last month, and now there are toys all over the place...but you get the idea! It's a long narrow room, divided into a play area and then an office/sewing/library area in the back half. Our goal has been to start turning the play room part into a den area and game room when the kids started getting older.

The hardest part of the switch? Picking a color scheme!

We finally decided upon the winning colors this weekend. Here's the fabric which is our inspiration:

via fabric.com

This is going to be a few throw pillows on the couch and futon, and the walls will be a light gray.

We also picked up fabric for curtains, a pale and medium chevron pattern. We had a hard time deciding on fabric for the curtains! The ones we liked were almost $8/yard, and as we were going to need eight yards, there was no way we wanted to spend that kind of money. We went to a local fabric chain store this weekend, and not only did we find the perfect fabric, but it was on sale for $3.49/yard! Less than $30 later, we had our fabric :) We'll be hanging curtain panels between the play room and office area, as well as new curtain panels for our craft and game closet (you can barely see the current curtains in the bottom right hand picture of our play room now).

We're also going to have solid color pillows in coordinating colors, plus a red and white chevron pillow for Miss Paige; she wanted red, white and gray as the color scheme, but the rest of our family voted for the winning color scheme.

A throw rug may also show up at some time as well, but we haven't decided on which color to go with.

One one of the walls, we're planning on doing this with thrift store frames:

via Living Well Spending Less

The frames will be spray painted in the red, turquoise, and dark gray or black colors. The kids can't wait to have their art work on display, and this momma can't wait to have art work that is easy to switch! We'll devote a big portion of one wall to this.

Eventually we'd love to change the flooring and add more lighting; there are only two ceiling lights, and one works half the time. We'll probably get a couple floor lamps for now if we can find them cheaply. We also have a foosball/ping pong/air hockey table that will end up in there, but the kids aren't quite ready to give up all the floor space yet!

Planning this is hard because it means my kids are growing up, but exciting as this is the one room where I feel like I can really show off my spunky side in my decorating and not have Pete cringe (he's the one who found the curtain fabric!). We hope that the colors will be able to grow with them, and that this will really be a room we'll all enjoy for years to come. We want the kids to have a fun space to have friends come over and hang out.


What do you have to be thankful for today?