Meet Maura Catherine:)

BG is here!!!! Everyone, meet Maura Catherine!!! She was born on Friday night, September 10th, at 9:17pm. She weighed 7 lbs 15 oz and was 20.5 inches long. (As I type this, she is almost exactly 2 weeks old!) She is amazing, we love her so much. We're parents!!! Its crazy:)

I'll write more about her birth story later, but I just wanted to let you guys know and show you a couple of pics! These are from when we were messing around playing and having a photo shoot in her room, which I'm going to try to do every Friday. She is such a sweet baby girl!!

And here she is with her dad, whom she just adores!!! She immediately quiets down every time he holds her or talks to her:)

We are really blessed and grateful for this little miracle baby! It's true, our lives are changed forever:)

Fall Review 2009

I'm so not ready for fall (I'm one of those people that hangs on as long as they can to the outgoing season, especially when its summer, my favorite!). But Melissa of the Inspired Room is hosting her 3rd Annual Fall Nesting Party today, and I wanted to get in on the action. Head on over there to check out tons of blog posts with awesome fall inspiration or link up if you can. Melissa said it was ok to show your fall decor from last year, so that's the route I'm taking:) Sorry that probably most of you have seen these pics before. Are you ready for fall?

{pumpkins on the stoop and in the transom window}

{bookcase in the the foyer}

{mantel decor}

{hand-made pillows from India replace the summer ones}

{DIY wall art in the living room}

{ledge shelve decor in the family room}

Which Rug?

Hello! How was everyone's Labor Day weekend? Still no baby yet (our due date is this Thursday, the 9th!)...so let's take a break from the nursery and talk about area rugs:)

So, remember how we just had new hardwood floors put in (as well as some of old floors refinished)?! I realized I forget to show you guys some after shots, with the furniture moved back in. Part of the reason why is because I got wrapped up in baby stuff and I think the other reason why is because I don't think of any of these rooms as finished now that they have new floors. It's not like these can really be considered afters, because having the new floors now means I want to do other things to the rooms to make them look better. Of course its always a snowball effect...you know what I'm talking about.

The biggest thing is that now we need area rugs. Large ones. And three of them. One for the family room, one for the living room and one for the dining room. We need them for function, both to protect the floors and just to have something softer underfoot. And we need them for aesthetic purposes too.

First up is the living room. Because I think I've stumbled on a rug I like, that's fairly inexpensive and that will help pull the room together with what's already in it. But I want to see what you think. Just for kicks, here's a real before picture of the living room the day we moved in:



Here's a somewhat updated photo of the living room before we had the nasty cream carpet ripped up and the new maple, dark walnut floors installed and stained:



Now here's the "after" living room with the new floors:



Now, excuse the really dark photos. Apparently my house doesn't get much natural light (because of the direction its facing), something I should have paid more attention to when house hunting. Oh well, we still love it! Of course, the floors look way better (at least I think so) but now we have other problems. Like most of the furniture in here is dark espresso. And dark brown on top of dark brown is not all that great. I'm considering lightening up the coffee table and the end table with paint (they're just cheap buys from Target) but an area rug in here to break up all that dark brown and add some contrast will really help. (How many times can you say dark in one paragraph?) Plus this room just needs some color. Its way too neutral.

So, while flipping through one of the latest Pottery Barn catalogs, I spotted these rugs:

{Striped Cotton Mat - Green}

{Striped Cotton Mat - Blue}

Don't they remind you of something you'd find from Dash & Albert? Except these PB ones are cheaper, the 8 x10 is only $169 (plus a $25 delivery surcharge...arrrghhh). I like that they both have that sort of caramel, golden brown in them that would coordinate well with the sofa we already have in here (as well as the fabric roman shades, even though I don't really like these anymore...ha!). I also don't mind that they are hand-woven cotton, as this is not the room in which we will be rolling around on the carpet playing now that we are about to have a child (that'll be the family room). And considering that we are, in fact, about to have kids, I'm not sure how long this room will remain a more formal "living room", so I'm sort of looking for an inexpensive fix that will work for now and hopefully versatile enough to use later depending on what the heck we do in here.

I wasn't sure which color way I liked better (although perhaps the green is better because the family room which adjoins this one is painted a soft shade of green, which might help tie the two together more?), so I decided to do some quick Photoshop mock ups to help me visualize each of these rugs in the space.

{Green}

{Blue}

Here they are from the other side of the room:

{Green}


{Blue}

What do you think? Do you like one better than the other? Do you like the randomness of the green stripes or the symmetrical pattern of the blue? Is the green better because it has more colors in it, which means more options for coordinating accessories? Or maybe neither is right? Seen any other rugs that you think might work better here? Thanks!!!

The Nursery: Progress Part IV

Hey! Back again with Part IV of progress in the nursery! To catch up: here's the dresser wall (part I), the the crib wall (part II) and the back window wall (part III). (If you've been following along, thank you so much for all the wonderful, positive comments. They make my day!) Oh and here's the floor plan again, just for consistency and a starting point:



I just had the last wall, the one on the left to do something with. This is where I decided to use the two white Ribba picture ledges I got at IKEA a few months ago. Back then I wasn't really sure where I was going to use them, so I bought the short ones (21 5/8") for $9.99 each. Pretty good deal, right? Here they are up and accessorized:



They fit perfectly right in between the side of the crib and the glider. I tried to style them with mostly things I already had so that I wouldn't be spending a lot more money. I also wanted to bring in some personal old stuff to add that vintage/antique feel.



My aunt painted the muppets for me as a gift for my 3rd birthday (30 years ago!). I liked the fun and bright color they added to the room, so they were the starting point for this little shelf vignette. In our basement there's a big tupperware tub labeled "Sarah's Childhood" - its full of old stuff of mine that I rescued from my parent's house when they were moving a few years ago. That's where I found some of my copybooks from first grade, where I practiced my spelling words. Too funny. Used one here. The little wooden dinosaur toy was a gift from one of my good friends when she first found out we were pregnant. In the bottom right hand corner you can see just a bit of one of the cute illustrated greeting cards I bought in PEI.



In the giant tupperware tub, I also found a pair of my old baby's shoes that my mom had saved.



For the shelf on the right side, I started with this childrens book called "When Pigasso met Mootisse" (mostly because of its yellow cover which helped to balance out the Muppets painting, but also because it was a gift for one of my birthdays while I was in college from a friend of mine...I collected childrens books back then just for their art). I took the other greeting card by illustrator Julie St-Onge-Drouin of Ketto, mounted it on some striped scrapbook paper and framed it for here. And there's the "Z", the last alphabet flash card that wouldn't fit in my 5 x 5 grid over the crib!!!