I just realized my pending daughter’s initials will be “SMG”.

As in – Sub Machine Gun.

That is awesome.

We’ve been slowly working through the practicalities of baby room preparation.  Mostly painting is all that’s done so far.  The former yellowish walls needed to go, in exchange for something… cozy-er, maybe?

We looked for a few schemes, just to decide what we actually liked as far as color, and found a set (that almost immediately disappeared from Lowe’s upon return visits – good timing!).

I find myself utterly confused at how a full-grown and full-bearded man begins wondering about color palettes and decorative planning.

And yet here we are.  I genuinely get excited at the prospect of building things that look cool to give my little firearm a sweet room to sleep in.  It’s sad, really.  I find myself needing to actively remember to grunt or punch something just to maintain my masculine sensibilities.  So much girly stuff being viewed, pinned, and otherwise considered as a DIY project or purchase for the little one.  Is this normal?  I need it to be World Cup season again, so I can excuse myself to scream at athletes and scratch myself.  Just to offset the gentler aspects of this.

A few select modifications, and I think we’ve settled on a range of hues that our friend Scooter says look like the Easter bunny threw up.  Not his room, so we’ll just ignore the man’s feedback.  I must admit – and he and I discussed this – that planning and building a place for your family is pretty manly.  It has the modern-day-suburban equivalent of feeling previously reserved for lumberjacks coming home from a long day chopping things and sweating testosterone.

The weird thing is, now that I’ve put up two coats of the “Quill” grey, the ceiling-fan light seems to make the new wall color appear identical to the existing ceiling off-white.  This is marginally frustrating to me, who expected an actual contrast of some sort.  Maybe it’s the light playing tricks, or maybe I just need to repaint the ceiling with some “Horseradish”.  Not the substance.  The paint color.  Weirdo.

I wonder if maybe I’m doing it wrong – which considering my decades-lack of home improvement work is entirely likely.

We still haven’t had a spare moment to actually go register for things and stuff for the little Sub-Machine Gun, but at least we have a palette of the pink, yellow, and blue to work with.  I hope it looks nice when it’s done.

We ended up at a cool antiques store in Augusta called ‘Mema Had One‘ and tucked into a corner were some not-for-sale decorations with colors the mommy liked.  Too bad the paper orbs weren’t able to be bought.  At least the colors could be captured, which helped give us some direction.

I’m trying to strike the balance – between my visual design sensibilities and making ‘pretty’ things work for the room.  Stuff my wife will be severely comfortable with.  Stuff that makes her happy.  And that’s really the point, right?  We’re working on these things together, and I can’t very well mount a chainsaw (pink or otherwise) on the wall in the baby’s room.  Much as I think Harley’d actually consider it for a fraction of a second just to humor me.  But she’s happy dreaming things for us to do in there.  And making her happy makes me happy.  So if that means I get to figure out how to incorporate frilly things and vintage elements to an overall pastel and girlish aesthetic WHAT KIND OF STRANGE WORDS ARE COMING OUT OF ME OH LORD WHY it’ll make my ladies happy.  And that matters enough to get over the silliness of ‘manliness’ and start oohing and ahhing at paint and mobiles and retro changing tables and places to put all sorts of things that are so pink they burn your eyes out.

Now to find some old dresser or wardrobe to fix up and turn shabby-chic (and to figure out what ‘shabby-chic’ means… I think it’s a flavor of ice cream but I’m not sure).