Things I love: at Pottery Barn Kids

Since before I had children, I have drooled over the Pottery Barn Kids catalog that comes 11 times each month. It's as if someone got in my head and gleaned all the information they'd need to design soft goods and furniture that would be right up my alley, then took stunning, well-lit pictures of all of it and sandwiched it all into one glorious, glossy periodical. And I call it a "periodical" because it is just as captivating to me as any magazine. MORE captivating than The Economist, BusinessWeek or NatGeo. I'm a Simple Girl.



So for this laid-back Sunday edition of Grass Stains, let's get started with this adorable knit zebra rattle set. Jake is still at the age where he occasionally knocks himself (or me) upside the head with his hard plastic rattle, and IT KILLS. Man, that kid has some strength. These would be a great alternative, except you can't rinse the spit-up right off of these fellows in the kitchen sink. Still, too cute.




Ooh! Ooh! Look what I found next! Granted, these branch-ish shelves wouldn't make much sense out of context (i.e., in a room that didn't have a tree mural painted on the wall), but I have four friends who HAVE had trees painted in their nurseries, so my Extensive Statistical Extrapolation tells me that there must be more of you out there.

Why, here's another one right here! What a coincidence. I'm posting this picture just because I love the way the mural is painted into the arch, and I LOVE ME SOME ARCH. I realize that this is a fictional room, probably something like those three-sided rooms they start with on Top Design and Design Star, but I love it anyway. If I ever build a house, it will have a nook of some kind somewhere.

P.S. In my experience, cream is not a very practical color choice for a chair and ottoman in a nursery. 1) Spit up is not always cream colored. [MEN, SKIP TO THE NEXT ITEM, IF YOU'RE EVEN STILL READING AT THIS POINT.] And 2) The Preparation H that you're still using on your hemorrhoids while you're at the stage that you're nursing/feeding/burping your child in that chair will stain it. Of course, it also stains the denim fabric, so perhaps that particular woe isn't a deal-breaker for the cream fabric. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

OK, next item. Even though I didn't grow up with an attachment to Dr. Seuss books, this nursery makes me smile. Bright, clean colors, stripes, a healthy dose of red ... it's just a happy place. The strange thing about the way they styled this room, though, is that it looks like they walked away before they really finished placing the furniture. I get that it's kind of neat to place the crib in the middle of the room, away from all the walls ... although in Jake's room if I tried that, he'd almost be able to touch all four walls. But the side table looks like it's about two feet from the window, four feet from the crib and seven feet from the dresser. What's up with that?

Another room that I'm posting because of the structural detail, not the furniture ... I love, love, love the wainscoting they installed on the accent wall and the way they hung the artwork and painted the monogram a little north of center. I sometimes use that method on my scrapbook pages and I'm usually pleased with the results. Again, if I ever build a house, I would love to do some wainscoting in a limited amount like this.

Next up is this great wall art! Oh, I love the colors, uniqueness, slightly vintage feel and moderate educational value of this piece. Never mind that it has the same problem that all the maps had when I was growing up ... I'm older now and can separate this beautiful art from the trauma I experienced at the hands of similar maps when I was young. I want one.

I am also in Deep Like with these rustic little farm animals. I love the green guy, whatever he is. I think the white one is a horse and the blue one a pig, but the green one is of indeterminate lineage. Nonetheless, I think they are adorable. I particularly love how their legs are thinner at the top and then get wide toward the bottom. For some reason, they remind me of Nick when he's being stubborn, standing with his hands on his hips.

And lastly, I have to have one of these 12-month picture frames. LOVELY. It's all 3-D and stuff. Since I take a lot of pictures, it's typically not a problem for me to do something like find one from each month in which one of my kids is facing the same way or basically the same degree of close up to or far away from the camera.


If I filled one of these frames, I can't decide if I'd want to go THAT route, where it was easy to compare growth from month to month because the pictures were all similar, or if I'd want to do something very different for each month, such as outdoor vs. indoor, extreme close-up vs. wide shot, with siblings vs. without siblings. I think if I'd done it with Nathaniel I would have done it the first way I described, but today I'd be tempted to go the less conventional route to make the pictures more interesting.

And here it is in a real room ... or at least one of those three-sided jobbies like they style for these catalogs. I love how they hand painted the elegant outer frame around it.

Is there anything at PBKids YOU just can't live without?