Ch..ch..ch..ch...changes.

It's been a while since I wrote - have you all missed me???

This weekend we turned Izzy's nursery into a big boy's room. A big boy's room with a crib, but a big boy's room nonetheless. Last weekend we went to Ikea and got the chest of drawers that matches his MAMMUT bedroom stuff (in turquoise and green), but we didn't like the matching bed (the headboard is fabric) so we didn't get it. We're going to paint his crib bright orange to match all the knobs in his room, when we convert it into a toddler bed. We also got him a cool new high chair.

I moved all the furniture around so that now he has room to play. I put the table and chairs in the corner and I put some of his favorite toys on it - his Leap Frog piano, a dinosaur puzzle, Busy Ball Bopper, and a Sesame Street pop-up toy. In the corner of the table I put his wipes warmer. I just can't let go of that yet. I'm afraid that would shock his privvies too much.

Beside his play table, I put the new lime green chest of drawers, which I topped off with his changing table pad. Behind the pad, leaning against the wall, I have a little purple Rubbermaid box with his hairbrush in it, and a couple of other odds and ends, and I have the half of his monitor that plays music and project a picture on the ceiling. We stopped using the monitor part a long time ago, but that projector is pretty awesome. The music it plays sounds like crickets outside at night. It's so relaxing.

We hang his paci's on the antenna of the monitor so we always know where to find them. Izzy likes to grab a couple of them as soon as I put him on the changing pad, and he pops one in his mouth, then the other. Then sometimes he'll grab another one, as if he's sampling fine wines, and wants the perfect vintage of paci.

Maybe we should take away the paci - but he's already growing up so fast. I put the changing table in his closet a couple of months ago, to make room for his new play table and chairs. It made a great shelving unit for diapers, wipes, and seldom played with toys. But I needed the closet for two of his other nursery furniture pieces. I had a white shelf beside the rocking recliner on which I kept some of the beautiful - and breakable - nick nacks that people had given us in honor of the Iz-man. They've slowly been working their way to the top shelf, but the unit itself began to be in peril. Joining the shelf in the closet is a little table that has a top drawer in which I kept Izzy's medicines, like Tylenol and Mylicon, and then two large wicker baskets lined in blue cloth beneath.

In the top basket I kept diapers, and in the bottom I kept Izzy's pj's and onesies. We kept this beside the changing table, at first, and then when we became afraid of our little daredevil taking a flying leap off, we kept it beside his play table, which is baby-height and which served nicely as a surface for his changing pad. It too, has taken it's place in the closet, where the baskets now serve as toy boxes.

As I moved the changing table out in the nursery...ooops, I mean bedroom... I sat down and looked at the paint that had began to chip of the Jenny Lind posts. I was suddenly so sad, for it really doesn't seem but like a month ago that my dad refinished it (it is a hand-me-down from a friend) and gave it a shiny coat of white enamel. Has it really been a year and a half since I moved it into the nursery and worried that when the baby came that the fumes might still be coming off it? I didn't realize then that Izzy would only be in the nursery for diaper changes, and that he would sleep in his bassinet by my bedside for six months.

I pulled the paci-holder off one of the rungs of the changing table. It's been a long time since we gave Izzy his paci anytime but when he's sleeping, so it's been hanging there forgotten for quite a while now.

It's been a long time since Izzy was a baby.