T-Rex's Nursery

Japanese homes are known for being tiny.  In fact, our first apartment in Japan had one room with a “kitchen” (hot plate, sink, and a mini fridge) on one side, a short skinny bed on the other side, a veranda and a bathroom.  We fancied it up with a chair and hanging rack for our clothes and still had enough room to do whatever we wanted, as long as what we wanted to do was stand up straight or leave.  Our current place is much more livable, we have a kitchen (no quotation marks needed), a bathroom, a balcony, a small living room and a bedroom.  We love our little apartment, it’s got a great location, it’s a great price, and the neighborhood is quiet—so we don’t plan to move.  But then we started thinking about where the baby will sleep.  Hmmmmm… 

We decided to get a little baby basket to put by the bed--nursery completed!  But—what about all of baby’s stuff?  What about when baby gets too big for the basket?  We still need a nursery.   We decided to take a third of the closet and make it into baby’s room.  There’s a shelf at about waist height and we’ll put the changing table and clothes storage on top of that.  Once baby outgrows the basket, baby will sleep on his/her own baby sleeping pad under the shelf.  When I first suggested this idea to Jon, he was horrified, “What?  We can’t have baby sleep in the closet!”  But, there really isn’t anywhere else, unless we’re willing to have baby sleep in the bathtub or on the balcony.  The nice thing is that the closet has a sliding door that we can use while T-Rex is sleeping, it will block any light that we use as we get ready for bed (presumably at a later time than the baby), but it’s small enough that we will be able to hear T-Rex crying or fussing through it.  

<--  Before

I spent a lot of time surfing the internet to find ideas for decorating our little closet nursery and Jon and I talked a lot about what we wanted it to look like.  In the end we were able to decorate almost the entire closet corner with things we had around the house or that we bought at the hyakuyen shop (100 Yen shop, just like our dollar stores) for less than $US40.  It was a little tricky, because we want the room to be bright and colorful, but there aren’t any outlets for lights near it and we can’t paint the walls. 

We chose an outdoor, tree theme for the nursery.  We started with blue fabric to pin on the walls for the sky and bought brown, green, and yellow felt for creating a tree.   I started by cutting out the shape of the tree and branches and about a million leaves.

Then I ironed the blue fabric and glued the branches and leaves to it.

While I was doing this, Jon was cutting up a sleeping pad we had lying around the house.  In Japan, people sleep on the floor, and we used to sleep on a foam pad before I got pregnant and we decided to upgrade to a nice mattress.  (Best choice we every made.)   We tried to give it away, but everyone has these thin sleeping pads lying around their house, so it was just taking up space in the closet.  Jon cut two squares out of it, which would lay on top of one another.  He cut the center out of the top one, making a square donut shape—this will make a raised rim around where the baby lays when we change the diaper.  Then he covered the whole thing in a waterproof picnic print tablecloth.

Here I am sewing on the trunk and leaves using embroidery thread.  It took a really long time.

Finally, we put it all together in the baby closet.  We don’t have many baby clothes or anything yet, but what we have, we put in the shelves.  We have an Easter outfit, some baby kimonos, and a T-Shirt with a T-Rex on it. 

 

You can see from this angle that it leads into Jon’s side of closet.

Finally, I found a really colorful and cute bed that we’ll put right next to our bed.  I like it because it’s so bright.  Once baby grows out of it, he/she will get her own baby sleeping mat underneath the changing corner.  We’ll wait till baby is a few months old before we even start worrying about getting that ready.