Bye, Bye Birdie

These photos are making me cringe, but because I’m having a computer memory/ hard drive emergency I can’t upload any new ones. You’ll have to suffer with my messy early camera skills on a few of these!

I put so much love into decorating Noodle’s room before she was born. You can read all about the details (and see the crazy “befores and afters”) in this Bird Themed Nursery post from last year.

It took over ten hours just to make this tree– especially trying to cut, glue and paint around my baby bump {being 8 months pregnant and all}.

My husband even put his DIY skills to the test after learning to hang moulding during the taping of our episode of HGTV’s Rip and Renew. He hung white moulding around the entire room to create a stripe, and then painted the stripe in beige and pink. This moulding took F-O-R-E-V-E-R to hang and paint, but he did it, because I smiled sweetly and told him his new baby girl would love it. {and who was he to resist a very pregnant ME asking a very non-pregnant HIM to carry some weight around here, you know what I mean?}

Even though I hadn’t met my daughter yet, in my heart I knew she’d be my little nature girl. I adored birds (it’s before “Put a Bird on It” was such a big craze, at least in my pre-blog reading world) and I had an amazing time dreaming up ideas, choosing fabrics and paint colors, and spending hour upon hour in here, getting it ready for our baby girl.

Then our world fell apart when her umbilical cord burst, and this room became my nightmare.

There are many reasons why, not the least of which it reminded me of our innocence before our world came crashing down.

That’s when this became the room I avoided for two months while she fought for life in the NICU. Then it became the room we never used because she had to sleep in our room so we could monitor her feeding pump all night long. Eventually this became the room occupied by Noodle and her night nurse as she was given continuous feeds from 11PM to 7AM each night via tube. Last but not least, this is now the room she refuses to sleep in. We aren’t sure why, but perhaps it has to do with the pain of reflux or the memory of tube feeding.

Plus, the walls are getting dingy.

It’s time for a change.

Join with me in saying Bye, Bye Birdie and help me choose a new color tomorrow. I’m in love with all three colors, so it will be hard, but duty calls. And then there’s the matter of what color to paint the stripe, but… we won’t go there. Yet.

By far the hardest part will be saying goodbye to the gallery wrapped canvas tree, but I’ll keep it somewhere safe until it can be used again. And NO, I do NOT mean for baby #3 (the thought makes me want to scream into a pillow for about 56 hours straight) but perhaps for a playroom in a future home of ours. Or a grandbaby’s room. In a VERY, very long time. Like, 22 years or so sounds about right. Then I’ll take lots of them. {pretty please?}