An Aesthetic Shift

On losing room / making room

One of the things that scared me most about having kids was the aesthetic. The bright primary colors are too much for this sensitive artsy girlie. The bubble fonts, the loud toys, the stark hot pinks and baby blues, the PLASTIC.

I wasn’t ready for the aesthetic shift of becoming a parent, and so far I have tried my best to resist it as much as I can. Everyone knows that my kids have established color palettes and people are generally pretty good about buying them clothes and toys on their millennial pink/lilac and sage/mint/indigo color schemes. :)

But even though the babies wear a lot of earth tones and mama’s favorite toys are artsy books and things that come straight from the classic art section of my personal craft archive (pompoms and crayons), the primary colors and bright neons and occasional loud, plastic, noisemakers of capitalism’s kids section have made their way into our lives.

And I secretly sometimes love it.

Other times I worry that I’m losing myself a little bit in this life. I find myself going out of my way to find Pikachu shirts and Sesame Street socks and Bluey coloring books like it’s my job. But it brings so so so much fun and joy to my toddler, to my husband, to myself, and even to the baby who probably can only see Elmo right now anyway.

This is life right now. Where Bluey is good entertainment, Elmo is a very very good friend, where we count things for fun, we marvel at how well a toddler can sing Disney songs, and where every day we get the privilege of witnessing the miracle of growth and change and discovery, and trying to soak up and appreciate every moment of it, because one day, I know I’ll miss it.

This is life right now in our little rowhome where the lines and boundaries of who’s running the show around here are constantly shifting.

I mournfully packed up my lately untouched magazine collection into a giant diaper box, labeled it “mama’s magazines,” and sent them away to our storage unit (unforgivable in purist minimalist schools of thought, but where we are at right now). But now the bebe art supplies and toys have more breathing room.

We’ve packed away spare pieces of furniture from my husband’s bachelor pad while we get that property ready to rent. My box of records and record player are waiting their next life out in the sun, safely away from destructive toddlers whipping them around. Grown-up Lego sets and craft kits sit unopened and untouched waiting for a day that they can be fully enjoyed, with leisure time. Now-vintage video game systems ask for the same.

The hope is that we will have less home projects, more leisure time, and more leisure space in the next iteration of our lives. We’re actively house hunting while emptying out the old bachelor pad to convert it to a rental, so this feels justified, and as the babies need more territory, our current house only offers the solution to part with the things that once made us so, and make way for the space they need to grow.

My small living mentality feels guilty that I’m saving these things for a future bigger home where I’ll have adult space to keep records and magazines including my one vintage Playboy out of reach of tiny hands and eyes. (The very 90s headline is “Trump back on top, richer than ever!” Couldn’t pass it up. Won’t ever give it up.)

Maybe I should just donate these things. But it also feels like a connection to the old me, the adult me, the plant mama, pastel me.

Maybe that me will never exist again, who’s to say. What’s for certain is that we can never go back. There’s a part of me that misses pastel Ams with her sunny art office, and a part of me that is excited for record playing mama Ams in a future sunroom that is also home to sunbathing yoga children lol. We’ll see how it goes.

Pictured: a living / dining room that often becomes my office / craft space alongside playing children (i.e. CHAOS, iykyk)

Next Up: reconfiguring our upstairs for larger sleeping quarters for our 4-month-old who can somehow turn all the way around in his bassinet!? Sometimes he gets stuck diagonally and wakes everyone up attempting to shout his way out of it. This will include: somehow squeezing an exactly 48” long dresser into an exactly 50” wide closet with an exactly 44” opening. Hopefully that works.

In other small space living deep dives: furniture-less living. We have pretty little furniture since we have pretty little space, and more often than not, someone ends up on the floor in our house out of necessity. I’ve become enthralled with homes where the parents have chosen a furniture-free lifestyle. I’ll never convince my household of this in a pure form, but a little baby step for me is using a folding bed tray that I bought for the toddler to use to color on (in lieu of having to invest our money and space in a kids sized table set) as a working desk, sitting on a yoga blanket and bolster on the floor during nap/computer work times. :)