The Playroom

If you're like me, you look through catalogs or pinterest and see amazing decorating ideas for your home.  For example, playrooms that look like this.
                                                                                                
Or like this:



           
Great options if you have more time, money, energy and space than we do.  For us, having a playroom at all has been a saving grace.  For the first four years of the twins' lives, we did not let them in our basement family room.  I'm not joking.  Pretty much the only time they came down there was for Christmas because that is where our stockings were hung (the only fireplace) and our tree was set up down here with all the presents because we didn't want it in the room where the boys normally played in (the living room). 

The 3 big boys thought the only thing that the basement was used for was celebrating Christmas since that was the only time they were allowed down there.  Haha!  We wanted one room that was for us--  free of plastic, board books, and many, many "guys' that have infiltrated our house in the last several years.  If you're a mom of boys, your son(s) undoubtedly plays with 'guys' of some sort.  We have multiple pins of "guys" pirates, superheroes, rescue heroes, toy story, robots, etc. 

When I was pregnant with Caleb, we tore out the bar in our basement family room to give us more play space but we still had our nicer furniture and TV downstairs and only allowed a few toys. After Caleb began to crawl, we reassessed our house setup.  In February, we switched around all our furniture and sort of reclaimed our living room (which is the only carpeted area of our house and has been where the kids played).  We put our nice furniture and TV up here and all the toys downstairs.  We repainted the living room and only have a few toys in here that are for Caleb. 

As Caleb has gotten good at going up and down the stairs and mouthing toys less, we have him downstairs in the playroom more and more.  I hope to fully reclaim my living room by moving all of Caleb's toys out sometime this winter.  Yay!

The downstairs playroom is nice because the boys have a big open space to play in.  Its great for me because I don't see the mess all day long as I am often upstairs in the middle level.  So I stress less about having it clean and tidy 24/7.  It may not be pottery barn worthy, but we were able to come up with a system of organizing it without having to buy many organizing bins, we just used things we already had in the house.

So without further ado, this is our playroom.

I'm sure your first thought upon looking at this was "the one thing that room really needs is some more plastic or primary colored items in that room!"  Okay, maybe not.  But I thought we needed some playroom "art" and I saw a canvas painting idea on pinterest that I thought my kids would like and all 4 of them could do it.  Although, I have not had the energy to let Caleb do his yet as I think its going to need to be done in the bathtub while he is naked so that he can immediately get hosed off.  I'll let you know if I work up the courage to let him do it.

So, the idea is to take canvas and write your child's name with masking tape on it.  Like this.

Then you let them fingerpaint the canvas. 

Once its dry, you take the tape off and their name is in white.  I bought a pack of canvases at Michaels.  we did the 9 x 12 size and we just barely were able to get our 6 letter names to fit (hence the reason that they are off kilter). 

And then we did one with each boy's handprint.  I haven't figured out if I want to write their names under each handprint or just leave it as it is and label their hands on the back.  We'll see.

Getting Caleb's handprint on the canvas and not everywhere else was definitely a challenge.  And getting him to keep his fingers spread apart wasn't either easy.  He thought the paint was funny and was making a fist with it.  So, that being said, I think it turned out pretty well.

And they fit in great with our playroom's design (bright colors, mismatched toys, and things my boys enjoy).  Here they are lined up against the ledge.  I may hang them eventually, but for now this will do because I'm lazy. 

 And here is Aaron who LOVES fingerpainting and long after the twins had given up on it, he was still at the table making handprints and painting with Qtips.  This boy loves arts and crafts.