Less is more?
When I was pregnant with my first baby about 3 years ago, I had certain ideas of what my life with children would look like.
I envisioned a modest wicker basket in our otherwise minimalistic living room, filled with a carefully chosen selection of either vintage or modern wooden toys. No batteries in my house!
Another vision I had involved a cute little toddler with 2 ponytails in her sweet and curly hair, strutting around in a white pinafore dress in our sunny garden filled with daffodils.
Three years later, my life looks sort of different. And it isn’t just the fact that my daughter’s hair didn’t start growing properly until she was 2!
I remember shortly after the birth of my daughter a friend gave me a third-hand toy called a baby gym (?). A hideous toy consisting of a brightly-coloured playmat with two bows crossing above and awful plastic toys dangling down from it. Thankfully it was foldable so I immediately hid it in disgust under my pristine, off-white couch.
Three months later, trying to deal with a baby who was becoming really, really bored in her (wooden) playpen, I pulled the dusty thing out from under the couch in despair. My baby was delighted. And from that moment onwards it went downhill… We got the musical mobile that plays Mozart, Beethoven and Bach (it’s ugly, but I can recommend it). We even borrowed an ‘activity centre’, a hideous, big, brightly-coloured plastic monster in which your baby can sit and pretend to be a DJ, playing the most awful electronic music. Our baby loved it.
Currently we have not one wicker basket but about 16, slowly taking over the space in our living room. And not all toys are vintage, modern or wooden!
We can’t really call our sofas white any more, but they’re constantly covered in kid’s clothes anyway, so who cares. My daughter, nearly three now, is really starting to get into the pink phase. I don’t know where she got it. And my son likes to enjoy himself with his battery-run plastic activity table.
Oh well, change makes progress, I like to say…
xxx, Esther
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The New York Times recently had an “interesting” article about parents trying to maintain their sense of style with regard to furniture and interior decor with children. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/garden/14kids.html.) If we made the kind of money those parents did, I might not scoff so much. But we don’t have that kind of money, so I think the parents are sort of nuts!
Our most recent exercise in give-and-take with the baby is swapping the Ikea Norrebo shelves in the living room for an Expedit unit turned on its side. The Expedit won’t tip over on him, and we’ve got a convenient place for all his toys. Sadly, our book and DVD collection has been relegated to the upstairs bedroom. Oh well.
I remember thinking some of those same things. Was all that plastic and noise necessary? I suppose so in some form or fashion. The life of being a mom.
I had similar thoughts when my first baby was born. She was born at the end of April and I thought I would spend my summer in my garden while she slept quietly beside me. There were so many mosquitoes that summer that I didn’t even want to bring her outside! She is 7 now (almost
and I wish I had been more relaxed and realistic when she was a baby.
Well…. we live in a 3-bedroom flat. One bedroom is for us, one tiny bedroom is for our two boys, and one large bedroom belongs to all the toys! It’s a terrible waste of valuable space. But at least my boys are happy!
xoxo
Our living room is so full of toys, I know it could be much more elegant… but that’s what we are right now: a family with two kids that are spoiled with loads of toys!
I have a secret, I actually still have not got a single battery operated toy in our flat. I just really cannot stand the noise. I know my daughter is going to accuse me of treating her badly by not getting her any when she becomes a teenager, but I am happily taking that risk. Our flat is just too small to have noisy toys in it!
I felt the same way when I was pregnant the first time. I had this thought that ours would be the house that you’d enter and “not even know there were kids living there” as it would just look the same as before with no plastic toys or bright-coloured highchairs or plastic baby equipment on display. I secretly had disdain for my friends with kids whose houses had been messed up and had lost their style due to toy/gear sprawl.
Like most everyone else, I of course got more realistic about it after baby’s arrival. I am happy to say, I now laugh at my former desire to live in a house with no evidence of kids. I am so PROUD and HAPPY to be a mum, and I know I am so LUCKY to have been able to have kids in my 30s in the first place, that I am now glad to display my son’s plastic, noisy trucks and mini-hoover and mega-blocks and all the other things that make life fun for him at this precious age. Plastic toys? Bring them on! This time is about him, not me and my house. I now think a house with no/few toys is so boring and sad!