Baby Mod Park Lane Crib

It’s actually surprisingly good quality and sturdy. There was a little mishap with confusing sets of screws.. if you accidentally switch the screws that were meant for the metal pieces that hold and adjust the mattress height on the the track that holds in the bottom drawers, the piece will seem like it’s finished and fine, but the bottom drawer won’t close.

After Jeff tried forcing it multiple times while I looked on in horror (YOU’RE GOING TO BREAK IT!!!) he finally conceded that something must be on wrong.. and noticed that it was the screws keeping the drawer from going in and realized the mistake.

Apparently the directions aren’t too clear in this regard, because reading the Walmart review of the crib we are not the first people to have made that error.

At any rate, it’s fine now and looks great. My only confusion is over how the bumper gets secured in the corners.. there’s no open slat in the corners to string it through! You can see where I tied them in the front in the center of the railings, and same in the back. But there’s really no way to secure them to the sides that I can see…

Where do you tie the bumper in on the corners?? 

I find this odd given that the crib is SHOWN with bumpers in the product picture, in fact they use the same bedding set we have! Why don’t the manufacturers  put in a little hole to string the bumper through at the corner? I don’t get it.

I guess it doesn’t matter too too much because we plan on having Jasper sleep in our room for the first 0-? months in the co-sleeper he got as a hand me down from Daphne:

By the time he’s old enough to get moved into his crib, he’ll probably be able to move around enough that we’ll have to take the bumper out anyway… so it’s almost purely decorative. Still, I’d like to know how it’s supposed to go on.

Any insights?

That means that we can go pick it up and put it together Sunday, so hopefully I’ll have pictures of that for Monday.

In the meantime I’ve been posting over at becoming-home about my nursery decorating ideas and finally think I’ve gotten somewhere, here’s the photoshop plan:

The Lamp in the picture only takes a 25w bulb though, that seems rather ridiculous doesn’t it?

I also received notice that my soft lime Savanah Roman Shades were shipped from JC Penney. Should receive those sometime early next week. I just wanted to let y’all mom-to-bes know that these shades are on sale at JCP just incase you were stumped like me trying to find shades in various solid colors.

There was lots of concern from the commenters at becoming-home about me taking on the mural project at this point in the pregnancy and wall decals were suggested as an option for the tree.. that sent me off researching and I had NO idea there were so many custom vinyl wall decal companies!

You can essentially get any design or even photograph printed as a wall decal for really reasonable prices.

Here are just a few of the companies that I found doing this in case you are interested in something similar:

Reuseable Vinyl Decals from Wallhogs.com

Regular Vinyl Wall Decals from Customvinyl.com (they even have some examples of nursery applications)

Directdecals.com

Wallstars

Even Blik does custom jobs, but I don’t know how reasonable they are.

I have to say though, the idea of wielding a ginormous 4-5 foot sticker actually may frighten me MORE than the idea of just buying a cheap artograph tracer or other projector and painting one one.. but maybe I’m being stubborn?

In any event, I spent hours and hours combing overstock.com for nice vector tree illustrations either to buy and use or as inspiration for Jeff to illustrate something (he is after all an illustrator!)

I made my lightbox public, you can see it here if you also were thinking about doing a tree mural.

Have a great weekend, hopefully I’ll be back Monday with lots of cute pics of baby Gemma and Daphne from our BBQ tomorrow..

I have to laugh a little when writing that because I can remember asking my friend Dawn a few years ago what the hell a glider was when I heard her talking about it with a pregnant friend!

For anyone reading who may not be schooled in pregnancy speak, a glider is a chair that instead of rocking back and forth glides parallel to the floor in a sort of front to back motion and is supposed to be ideal for nursing. Most often they are purchased with an accompanying ottoman.

A glider & ottoman combo from the preeminent glider manufacturer Dutalier can easily run you in the range of $700-$800 depending on the model and options (does it also swivel, does it recline etc).

The crazy thing is, for the most part they are pretty fugly. At least I think so..They look like overgrown wooden porch rockers wrapped in batting. To me, gliders are the ceiling fans of the baby worlds, an unfortunate but necessary evil. Most look something like this:

Unless of course you get the slipcovered upholstered armchair versions like this one from Land of Nod (*swoon!*):

And believe me, if I a) had the money (it’s $1198 BEFORE shipping for this combo) and b) had the space, I would snap that baby up in a second..

But, I don’t. So I was unbelievably excited when I saw a glider at a group consignment sale near me last weekend.. it wasn’t the upholstered kind I lust after, but it was the perfect color (natural wood with ivory cushions) and it was one of Dutailier’s higher end models.. the kind that reclines and the cushions come completely off for cleaning (most of the cheaper ones at BRU don’t, so if you get white I can’t imagine how you keep them clean!) and it even came with a slip cover which is really really rare. Unfortunately, the slip cover was pink.. and the price tag was $250.

Now $250 is obviously better than the $800 or so that model would run me new, but you can also get really low end Dutailier models from target.com for about $170 so I wasn’t totally convinced.

But then I learned that in the evening of the last day of the show, anything that was left over and didn’t have a red star on it would be half price. For $125 it was a complete no brainer. The catch of course was that it might not still be there by then….

So I left it up to fate.

If the glider was still there when I returned the next night I would buy it. If not, I would continue searching and figure it wasn’t meant to be.

It was there! And that is the rather long story of how I scored this perfect condition Dutailier “Comfort Plus Sleigh Back Glider” reclining glider for about 1/10th of what it is worth:

My consignment sale score.. Dutailier glider & ottoman for $125!

If I had not stumbled upon this consignment sale by accident (you can check this website for seasonal consignment sales in your state) my next choice would have been one of these Upholstered Dutailier armchair gliders from babycenter.com:

(About $374 for the glider & $204 for the ottoman with free shipping.).

And looking at them, I sort of still pine after that upholstered look… but still, $125 was just too good to pass up!

What have you all decided on for gliders?