NB: Almost everything is either child’s art, old toys, books that double as “art,” or stuff from Ikea – save for one cabinet from Tequila Kola (on sale) and the bunk beds being from Indigo Kids and Kokoon (also on sale). As with the accident we had with cheap glass, I’m not getting cheap lofts the kids are going to sleep on and under… (Oh, and re the wall decals -the Cars ones were reused over 5 years, the fabric ones are mostly ~2 years old…)
This little kiddie…
Peeled off the Cars wall decals her brother had outgrown.
(And didn’t want them to go to waste so she stuck them in her own room…. While being a Cat.)
This little kiddie…
Gleefully replaced everything with strange, block-y pictures
And turned part of his Lego Headquarters into a Minecraft Weapons Wall (yes, that’s Cobblestone wrapping paper wallpapering one of the sections – picked that up from when I lived in a dorm, it’s a very inexpensive way to keep changing the look of your space drastically and quickly)
This little kiddie…..
Kept rearranging her Birds In Hats.
(Like so)
And so. (The pink bull terrier is a broken old designer lamp from Lane Crawford Home that I bought as stress relief during my harder core banking days…)
And so (school art projects abound).
These little kiddies……
Also at some point did their parents’ bedroom wall…
Before their old artjamming canvases were turned into a triptych…
…And their Ikea Scribble Cabinet displays Rockstar’s clay art from Year 3 in school…
…Oh, and there’s Rockstar’s cross stitch project for Y2 (still a great way to learn coordinates on grids and graphs – the cross stitch diagrams they followed were surprisingly similar)…
Then these little kiddies…….
Fought over whether Boo The Cutest Dogs should sit in the Miss’ flower pots (she likes rearranging Ikea fake flowers at her Reading Window Where She Does Everything But Read)
Before calling a truce for a snack (fusilli pasta and crackers and cheese)
And rearrangement of tiny bits of Lego (Rockstar does these things for the Miss to find)
(Like this elf thing who dropped something)
Dear readers, at this point, let us have a flashback.
This is the cheap China cabinet I cut my hand on…
…from this post where I had to go to the hospital for stitches.
Now go back up and look at all the spaces we continue to decorate in ongoing projects. See, oysters don’t despair when they find something uncomfortable in their shell. Those ugly little pieces of otherwise delicious seafood make pearls.
There’s a metaphor in that toilet roll plane the Miss brought home from school one day…
(Although this is probably not it. :D)
Have a wonderful week ahead, dears. The world is your oyster 😉
ps: For more on turning your little kiddie art – some of it not exactly Picasso (:D) – into “actual” decor, read Treasuring Your Child’s Art.
if I didn’t know any better, I would think I have wandered into an art gallery. I love the art work on their Ikea Scribble Cabinet – a real gem.
It is a joy to see both of them enjoying themselves with painting the walls and decorating their rooms and reusing those walls decal.
One plus about getting them to do it is it uses up a bit of their energy… Otherwise they really have so much ok…
Re the scribble cabinet, it doesn’t show in the pic, but there are serial-killer-ish stab marks all over in various shades as well 😀 Rockstar then got unhappy and covered over some of them…
I got a question. A very serious one Aileen… How DO you fit/squeeze/stuff more and more things into your place?! I have an older kid with lots of craft work too. And a toddler. And living in a condo. And ermm, I feel the need to DECLUTTER every few months by throwing/giving things rather ruthlessly away. >.< Sounds alil like your husband if I remember correctly from your past posts ie the throwing away bit? And I still wish I had more space. Gasp! Ooooh! Just remembered, you've a storage rental space right?! Is that the "secret"?! 😀
We do throw stuff away, sometimes I keep just small pieces of the whole thing and make a collage or something… Or if they forget then can throw 😀
We also installed Ikea wall cupboards around the ceiling quite high up, not in places they play under – so I think if/when we move the landlord will say something… But after awhile of living “temporarily” and feeling like we’re not really “living living” every place we stop, I went and did it – had all the stuff put up – cos otherwise it was starting to affect my enjoyment of having the super active kids about…
Not that much kiddie stuff goes in the storage because then they outgrow it and when we don’t see it we don’t use it… The bags of old school/ chinese tuition books are building up though, and eventually we will put those in storage yes 🙂
This is impressive! I never had my works put up around the house as decor as a kid, neither were my three other sisters’ – as you can imagine our (parents’) house is a typical austere Chinese house with clean walls and the occasional fengshui paintings. I guess while the SG education system kills creativity (or maybe the system just never got round to prioritising the need to nurture an appreciation for arts/”finer things in life”), my parents came from an era of pragmatism where art = mess. OK that was an elaborate comment, haha. Just want to say that you’re a super cool mom! 😀
Wah thank you so much leh… I paisay and didn’t know what to say to that (sheepish)… My parents also very strict and I had a lot of tuition and ECA, but my mum loved drawing so would sit and sketch for me and now my kids… There was one early childhood memory that stayed with me… My mum painted a huge Disney animals-themed mural in my nursery when I was a toddler… I don’t know what happened to that room in our first home, my parents still own it but it’s pretty permanently rented out and I haven’t been back or seen that room since early childhood… But I have this one memory of seeing her painting the unfinished wall…