So, in a previous blog with Erin, I wrote about the craziness of redoing Coco’s (13) room and the havoc it struck on the rest of the house. {Coco Room Apocalypse}  I now feel ready to defend, I mean explain, myself.  There had been an epidemic of teenage redecorating in her class and we were one of the last to fall victim.  We should have painted during the summer, but as Coco put it, “We were too busy living life.”  Well, we started living the high life of cleaning and sprucing up the week of Thanksgiving.  (I know, bad timing.  I already acknowledged this in the other post.)

So Jellybean (11) was helping me and chatting with me as I painted.  She says, “You should have known we would hate pink and purple when we were old.  I’m going to save time when I have kids and paint my girls’ rooms blue to start with.”

This indeed sounded like a good idea as I was drowning hummingbirds and butterflies in Caribbean Blue.  Coco, Frank, and I had already spent hours removing the trellis wallpaper border that completed the garden gazebo theme.

By the way, just don’t do wallpaper. The horror on the Home Depot clerk’s face when I began my request, “Where is the wallpaper…,” was only trumped by his relief when I ended the sentence with the word, “remover.”

Garden Gazebo Theme. Pregnancy hormones must have deluded me into thinking wallpaper border and stenciling were good ideas.

In my defense, Coco’s room was decorated 11 years ago when Jellybean overtook the nursery.  Eleven years.  My Coco is not so much a pack rat as a prolific creator and collector of stuff. She then tends to bury this stuff away and then promptly forget all about it.  So really, she is more of a happy-go-lucky squirrel than a nasty old rat.

So due to this squirreling, I am finding a treasure trove of Coco-ness shoved in boxes, books, and under furniture. My favorite find was the foreword to her first novel crediting her sister for inspiring the title.

I could go on (there was A LOT of stuff), but the specifics of my child’s preciousness doesn’t have to be detailed here. But, it all tugged at my heartstrings.  It also made me grateful that I had gotten pushed into the whole re-decorating slippery slope.  (And believe me; I did not embark on this project willingly.  You feel kinda attached to the dozens of pansies you lovingly hand-painted for your first born while six months pregnant with your second.  Hmmm… or maybe I just felt attached in the sense that I did not feel like sanding and priming all of those suckers.  I’m going to go with mother’s love over laziness, just for the sake of my next point).

So here is why I am grateful, even though I’m a little cracked from the whole snowballing project. Do you think that a surprise walk down memory lane would feel like warm nostalgia five years from now when Coco goes off to college??  No!  It would feel like sucker punches!  Sucker punches that could land me curled around a teddy bear longing to turn back time.

So I’m glad I didn’t have the forethought to decorate a 2 year-old’s room with her future teen self in mind. Otherwise, this massive clean-out might not have taken place until she leaped from the nest.  So criticize something else, Jellybean.  I’m letting Coco project HER view of self on her room and I’ve assembled a nice box of mementos that I can choose to open when I WANT that trip down memory lane.

So if you need me, I’ll be the one floating down the River “De-Nile” ignoring that Coco has 5 more years to squirrel away new landmines of preciousness for me to find.

Oh yeah, and in response to Jellybean’s pleas that her room, too, be repainted, I say, “In five years, all this can be yours.”

-Ellen

Finished product. It was worth it, right? Right!?!