Holly's Nursery

At long last, Holly's nursery is finally done and ready to be shared online (only took us four months...)!

Back over the summer, I had the hardest time finding a theme that was girly but not pink walls, princess, over-the-top feminine.  I had looked everywhere -- Pinterest, every feasible store website, four (yes, FOUR) fabric stores -- and couldn't find anything I like.  Note to Self: make girly dinosaur nursery stuff, market it, and make a million dollars. 

Then, one afternoon at Buy Buy Baby, I was taking an "I'm exhausted from all the nursery-searching and also generally being pregnant" break in the gliders.  Jason brought me a package of decals he had found.... Alphabet.  Girly alphabet.  Girly alphabet in fun colors that weren't just pinks and purples.  SOLD!  (also, love him!  He knows me so well).  Added bonus: Tyler is obsessed with the alphabet, so maybe he wouldn't mind so much that his play room was being converted into another bedroom if he got to look at ABC stuff in the new room!

Anyway, I used the decals as a springboard and built the room off of it.  I present... Holly's bedroom!  *fanfare*

Handmade fleece blanket, ABC sheets (close-up in another picture), canvasses based off the decals, and yellow chevron curtains)

close-up of the canvasses (W is for watermelon whales, O is for owl on an orange tree, etc.)

close-up of the (wrinkly) ABC sheets I was able to find

other side of the room -- white furniture from IKEA (which was how we were able to go with such a dark gray paint), the decals, yellow chevron changing pad, and fun pink clock

close-up of the decals (note the pictures the canvasses were based off of)

I never did make Tyler letters, but I made Holly some understated ones that she'll hopefully be able to keep for years.  Problem: once I painted them, we couldn't find a spot for them!  Jason saved the day by mounting them above her closet.

So that's Holly's room!

The Story of "Holly"

This is the story of how we came up with Holly's name.

Though we were originally hoping for a boy, one big relief in finding out we were going to have a girl was that girl names seem infinitely easier to pick than boys.  Looking through baby apps, I quickly discovered something about the names I gravitated towards... they were all "lee" names.  Seriously, some of my contenders -- Hailey, Hallie, Holly, Caley, Callie, Kylie.  Jason nixed most of them, saying they didn't sound like "real" names.  Still, they stayed on my list.

We went back and forth with names, usually immediately hating the names the other suggested.  I won't list them here, because I don't want to hurt any feelings (especially if you have those names for hypothetical or real children), but we just couldn't agree.  Even the few times we both agreed, we usually ended up talking ourselves out of it.  Several were just too "out there" for me or too commonplace (we wanted a happy medium).

We were at an impasse.  We tried to get Tyler to pick (That's become a new favorite thing for us, especially when picking restaurants.  What?  It could work for baby sister, too!), but after we'd name our "big 6" (3 were Jason picks, 3 were Megan picks, none had been vetoed, but none had been highly favored), he'd just say her name should be "Baby Sister."  Hmm, if it worked for the Berenstain Bears, it could work for the Selfs, right?  Right?!?


Two weeks before my due date, my nephew Hudson was born.  I talked to Tyler about it, sharing that his new cousin's name was "Hudson."  I asked again, "Tyler, what's baby sister's name going to be?"  And then my sweet sweet boy said, "Holly."  Well, to be honest, he said "Hawwwley" (he's gonna have his mama's drawl, I believe).  No prompting or anything.  I whipped out my phone, pressed record, and asked him again.  He said it again, "Holly."  I very quickly sent it to Jason, saying we had to name her Holly.  The fact that "Holly" was one of my 3 picks, well, that's just a coincidence!

Hudson was born the Saturday before Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving morning at breakfast, we once again discussed names and somehow landed on Holly.  I was ecstatic!  Her middle name, Coraline, was a name both of us liked, but we had ruled it out as a first name.  I was concerned that if it was her first name, she'd suffer from a lifetime of being called "Caroline," and that would just be annoying.  So we made it her middle name instead!

Four months in, I've said it about a million times now, and I still love the name!  My sweet, sweet Holly. :)