Monkey See, Monkey Do

My favorite part of pregnancy is the "nesting" phase...  that last trimester when you really get to arrange, and rearrange, and REarrange all of your new baby goodies in preparation for your new arrival (and then you rearrange again after Baby comes because you realize that your pre-baby organization wasn't very practical).  Or was that just me?

And then there's DECORATING!  As IF the baby really cares, but Mommy cares!  Everything has to look PERFECTLY CUTE just like Baby!  So I get really excited when I get to add a little special touch to help other mommies complete their nests. 

Ethan and Leyson at our church's Fall Fest

Courtney and I were pregnant at the same time, but Leyson was born a little over a month before Ethan.  This gave me a little bit of time to create something special for Baby Ethan's room.  Even as a newborn, Leyson got to watch Mommy paint :-)  Lucky him!

Since Crista (my sister who helped me start Kidspired Creations) knows Courtney, too, she came over to help... she also got all of the supplies together, the idea, the everything... Hey,  I had just had a baby, after all!

We wanted this to be a surprise for the first time mommy and daddy, so the only hints we had about the nursery were "green" and "monkeys."  Well, that's all we need to make something cute!  Crista bought the coat rack, letters, paint, and the wooden monkeys.  However, we wanted bananas, but that posed a problem:  we couldn't find bananas. 

We really wanted that 3-D effect like the monkeys, so we had to figure out a way to make bananas.  Crista bought 4 blue crescent moons that had stars attached.  We popped the stars off, turned the moons around (because the glue from the stars left a rough spot), and painted the moons yellow.  This required several coats since the moons were blue before.  I then added "banana details"... a little bit of brown, a little bit of green, a stem, a few lines, put 2 bananas together and voilà!  What once were moons are now bunches of bananas!

  

Kidspired's Creation:

We used painters tape to create straight lines and wood glue to glue the monkeys, bananas, and letters in place.  The dotted stitch lines around each of the letters helped Ethan's name stand out above the eye-drawing detail of the monkeys and bananas.

The Reveal:

 

Other coat racks with letters:

I loved the way Ethan's turned out so I made one for Leyson too!

Geaux Tigers!