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Go Big or Go Home (to read)

Big girl, that is. Kenzie's big girl room is well underway. It's actually done for now. The only thing in her room that reminds us that she is still such a little girl is her crib. Really, that's only there because she is a mover and a shaker... and I'm convinced that if she could get out of bed alone at night that she would spend all night reading to her stuffed animals or playing dress up. She doesn't mind either and she still hasn't tried to climb out despite the fact that she is quite the monkey. I think she likes the security. She can remain in that crib as long as she needs (within reason) and I am happy to let her do that, for now.


Other than that though, we finally finished the transition to her "Big Girl Room". We knew eventually we would need to remove the glider from her room to put it in Will's room. We didn't want to wait until too close to his due date and we were ready to start transitioning her a bit so we make a huge deal about her reading corner. We have talked about it for MONTHS. We started with getting her a reading chair for her birthday. She loves it! She will drag it around the house to sit in it all the time. We are hoping it remains in her room more now that is is part of her reading corner.

We also hit up Ikea to purchase spice racks. Yeps, that's how they market them. Spice racks. They end up working really well as bookshelves though and that's the route we decided to take. Unlike most items bought from Ikea. they were super simple to assemble. Steven and I did have a good laugh though over the pictures on the inside. The first showed a person opening the package and looking at the instructions... then the second showed that person calling Ikea on the phone. Yep, sounds about par for the course on an Ikea piece. Granted, if you needed help assembling this... wow. That's all I have to say about that. I will definitely recommend these "spice racks" for children's rooms as bookshelves. I have considered painting them to match the crate that also holds books in her room, but I haven't done that yet. I figure I can do that at any point in time.

Speaking of the crate, that is actually the bottom portion of her lemonade stand from her birthday. I am all about upcycling things whenever possible. So, I purchased the crate in a size that I knew would not only work for her lemonade stand, but would also work well later to hold books in her room. It is a great size and provides her a bit more space to put her books. Our kid has a TON of books. She can recite most of them to you but she never tires of reading them (again, hence the reason for a reading corner.)

She also has this adorable chalkboard/white board made by Melissa & Doug (who I will also recommend EVERYTHING from as they make the cutest toys and they are good quality). Kenzie loves all her stuff from them. This "ABC" board (as Kenzie refers to is) is perfect for her reading corner. I took the chalk and dry erase marker for now because that would just be a mess, but she loves using her ABCs. She can almost sing the entire ABC song at this point so now we are working on actually identifying the letters (and numbers).



I think the transition to her big girl reading corner went well. She wasn't sad to see the glider go and she was super excited with her new corner. We now do our bedtime routine in that corner so she can sit in her comfy chair while one of us reads a bedtime story to her. She knows the glider is now in Will's room and seems okay with that. We will see how it goes long term. =)

And just because it cracked me up... Jack photobombed me. He looks like he might be ready to swallow the reading corner whole.



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