So, I've thought and thought and though about what to do with the nursery. Right now our second bedroom is a catch all room that is a jumble of tools and remnants of old home improvement projects. We're working on cleaning it out and I wanted to go buy paint this weekend. At first, since the room is already bright yellow (I didn't do that, it was that way when we moved in) I was just going to paint some little bees on the wall and go with a bee theme since it's gender neutral and I kind of like that small room having bright paint. Well, my husband is a SCUBA diver, so he really wanted to do a coral reef theme. He rarely gets his way when it comes to decorating the house and I thought it was awesome that he'd even put the effort forth to come up with an idea since his approach to starting a family had been avoidance of the subject for the first years of our marriage and he still carries some of that attitude with him (though now I think he avoids the subject because it stresses him out to think about fatherhood.) So I said, great, coral reef, done. I'm a graphic designer, so I started doing some visual reference searches and came up with an idea to have a nice blue on blue silhouette mural. I didn't want to do anything full color because not only is that a lot of effort to hand paint, I just don't like having to much of a jumble of color. I made a mock up of what I was thinking and e-mailed it over to him for his approval (yeah, that's how we roll). We get up early and drive to the hardware store and we walk in and I'm going to pick out some blues and he's like "we'll need some red and black and green, or should we just use acrylics?" I'm like, what?! Didn't you look at the mock up I sent you? He was confused because he thought since I said it was a mock up, that I would be filling in the silhouettes of the fish with full color illustration. I'm like ARE YOU CRAZY?! Do you have any idea how long that will take???
Let me just say here that I haven't had any real emotional outbursts during my pregnancy. I get cranky when I'm hungry, but that's easily solved. I haven't gone on crazy crying jags or just flipped my lid for no reason. I have gotten unnecessarily livid at work in response to an e-mail from a coworker that was really no big deal, but I realized it was probably hormones and let myself cool down before replying. So when I say I freaked out in the hardware store, I mean, I really freaked out. I was like yelling at my husband about how much time and effort I'd put into this, and I'm the designer in the family so that makes me the authority on what looks good and he should just suck it up because his idea was stupid and would look horrible while my idea was informed by hours of research into current trends. And, really, we're talking probably about 20 hours of searching out source material, compiling some artwork resources and drawing a mockup - the same approach I take with all of my work, so I didn't take wasting that amount of time lightly. We ended up having to go out into the parking lot and continuing our argument in the car where I pretty much melted down into a crying puddle. Eventually, we decided that we would ditch the coral reef idea since we were obviously on two completely different pages and go to the bookstore to look through children's books to get another idea.
We considered Pooh bear (my husband is a big fan of Tigger), Peter Rabbit, Dr. Seuss' "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" and a few other ideas. I don't really like over-exposure to branding, so we were about to settle on hot air balloons when we spotted a display that had an Angry Birds game on it. He was obsessed with that game for a few weeks last year and then his mother and I played it all night one night while the guys worked out in the woodshop at his parents' house. Anyway, we were like, hmmmm....Angry Birds nursery?
And so that's what it will be. We went back to the hardware store and got some paint for the background, searched the web for a few images to base the wall mural on and will start painting one of these days when it's warm enough to open the windows. I'm really glad we were able to come to a compromise and I'm a little embarrassed about how I freaked out about something so silly IN PUBLIC (which we never do. If we have disagreements, we always work them out in private).
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