ninainvorm.punt.nl

ninainvorm 2013-04-02 09:57 - (1) - permalink- in About me, In my home

It's hard not to feel this constant hurry chasing me these days. Julie started at daycare for the first time today, but instead of contemplating that a bit -Baby! Growing! End of an era...- I have a to-do-list this long that it makes me scared, excited and exhausted at the same time. Ah well, let's start with this little blog post to ignore that list just a wee bit longer... ;)

I've been looking at this poster a lot these days, it says 'Why all the hurry, do you know when your work is done?'. Each time I felt stressed about all the work that was piling up while I was 'just mothering', I looked at the poster and realized that these to-do-lists only exist in your head. Well, though the 'not-yet-done' part of the list also shows in your house a bit! ;)

So... good luck to me, let's get started!

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Round here #6

ninainvorm 2013-03-02 22:36 - (13) - permalink- in In my home

The 'if only life were a bit more glamorous' wish also applies to our home...

Right now life seems to be this constant struggle against the mess, and I often curse myself for on the one hand loving beautiful things so much (and therefore feeling so frustrated by the current look of our house) while on the other hand being messy myself and creating super messy offspring ;).

Is it possible at all to teach an obstinate two-year-old toddler how to tidy up? God knows we try, but right now all Rosa does is order me to 'Tidy up!' in a very bossy voice as soon as she drops something onto the floor... (or 'Opluim!' in Dutch ;))

Every now and then I manage to create one super small more or less organized corner...

Taking pictures of small corners of my home has always been sort of a useless but fun little habit of mine, but right now it's more like a necessity, because in our current household a few minutes later it may already look like there's never been an organized corner at all!

The wonderful little painting is a birth gift for Julie from Octavie... So special and beautiful!

We were also very lucky that Ingrid surprised us with a name sign that matches the one that she made Rosa a few years ago.

It was by the way also Ingrid who inspired us to buy this very large Karlsson clock a while ago (I saw a similar one from Habitat in her home years ago and fell in love with it immediately, years later our own clock stopped ticking, so we finally had a good reason to buy this one).

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Messy me and the miracle sister

ninainvorm 2012-10-02 22:09 - (16) - permalink- in In my home

There's certain things that somehow never work for someone like me. For example: I received a nice colorful Engel garland at the Woonbeurs, but when I unwrapped the foil the rope of the garland was already quite messed up, and when I tried to untie the knots it somehow only got much worse. Then as a bonus Rosa wanted to play with it, so within a few minutes the garland was all hopeless knots and mess.

Untying knots always makes me completely nervous, so I quickly gave up on the garland and considered using my scissors to cut off the colorful paper circles that I liked best (they have really lovely prints).

But then my sister Olga came to visit, and since we have two types of people in the family (the very precise ones like my mother and sister, and the ones who get all freaky and nervous from very precise jobs like me), I thought I'd show her the garland as a fun (and in my view impossible) challenge.

It took even my precise sister some time, but she did it!

Those black walls simply beg for a bit of neon...

Yes, even Rosa, who wore neon striped pants, heard the call of the black wall... ;)

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A black room for the kids

ninainvorm 2012-09-02 23:45 - (5) - permalink- in In my home

Though most people (including me! ;)) know me as someone who loves bright and bold colors, I've been dreaming about the idea of a black wall in the house for a while. A black wall combined with lots of bright colors, that is. I was fantasizing about a black wall in the dining room, combined with like a bright yellow or green table, or a wooden table with chairs in lots of colors, but I didn't really think what I had in mind would work in our current dining area, so that idea has to wait for a future new home.

Then the plan to change some rooms in the house came up: we wanted Rosa and the new baby to have a large room together, so we decided to move Helmut's study to Rosa's small room and make the larger study into a room for Rosa and the baby. I thought maybe this would be the moment to try the black wall, but I hesitated a bit: black in the kids room, isn't that a bit of a no-go? Don't they always tell you that babies and young kids should be surrounded by soft, sweet new-agey tones in order to develop into mentally healthy human beings?

But then I thought about something that would make the black wall not just a fun style experiment for their mama, but also a playful extra for the kids (and not just something that would cause them nightmares ;)): painting the wall with black chalk board paint. Drawing on the wall always seemed fun to me, and maybe the possibility to draw on the wall from her bed would even keep Rosa in bed slightly longer in the mornings...

I vaguely remembered that I once pinned something like I had in mind on my children's rooms pinterest board, and yes, these images from the Finnish blog Koulun lattia narisee convinced me even more that I really liked this combination of black & bright for a children's room.

So a little while ago we started emptying Helmut's super stuffed study -a place I've probably never ever shown here because it was such an uninteresting place (that is, for those of us interested in interiors, maybe not for those of us interested in huge collections of cds and dvds ;)) and then we painted the wall, and this weekend it was finally time to move all the furniture from the one room to the other and show Rosa her new place.

From the first moment, she was very much intrigued by the new room and she immediately started playing there enthusiastically (in fact the only moment she had looked a bit puzzled was when her yellow bed was standing in the living room for a while during the process of moving all the furniture!).

Actually going to sleep in her new room seemed a bit more of a challenge at first...

But who would be that keen to go to sleep when she could draw on the walls as well?

The room still needs lots of decoration to be done, and I already noticed that that's a whole different story now compared to when I decorated Rosa's first nursery. Back then I could do whatever I liked, knowing that it would take quite some time till Rosa would be physically able to make actual changes to the room. Now I wanted her to really be involved in the process of making the new room her own, so we did the decoration together, which in fact meant that I put something somewhere, and then Rosa would pick it up and put it somewhere else again ;). Ah well, it's her room! (I must do my 'one-day-perfect-decoration' and take some pictures of it once, when she's at daycare ;))