Most parents to be will tell you that decorating the nursery is one of the points during pregnancy when things start to feel very real. You’re dedicating a whole room in your house to a new little person, who will be moving in with you on that oh-so-scary day when you bring them home from the hospital, and more than likely taking over your home as much as they do your heart!

For the Lightys, when it came to nursery style, it found us rather than us finding it. We decided not to find out at the 20 week scan whether Baby Lighty was a boy or a girl, and so we had to go neutral with the nursery. We’d not long rennovated our entire house so Baby Lighty’s room didn’t need to be decorated at all, it just needed to be ‘added to’ to make it more baby-fied. In fact, when we bought the house three years before Baby Lighty’s arrival, I deliberately chose a very neutral shade – Natural Calico, for those that are interested – for the walls, in the hope that it would be a baby’s room one day. I also wanted to keep the room fairly simple; at the moment Baby Lighty is in the box room, but one day it’s likely that he’ll move into our second bedroom, so I didn’t want to make the box room too babyish with the likes of wallpaper borders or wall stickers.

Anyway, I digress; as I was saying, the nursery style found us rather than us finding it. By this I mean that one day, Mr and Mrs Lighty were on one of their many visits to their local branch of Babies R Us. It was definitely ‘one of many’ visits, we even got recognised by one of the sales ladies last weekend when we went back to buy a stroller, having not been in there for nearly 10 months! And it was on one of those visits that one of their bedding sets caught my eye: Hip Hip Hooray! Not just a cheer for having found our nursery style, this was the name of the bedding that took Mrs Lighty’s fancy! It’s a really cute design depicting the hare and the tortoise racing, with lots of little bunting details thrown in, which naturally appealed to the bunting addict that is Mrs Lighty. We bought the bedding set there and then, despite the fact that, as I saw pointed out in a Facebook group recently, it was really a waste of money as the quilt and bumpers were never to be used for safe-sleeping safety reasons. We also bought the uplighter lampshade, as well as the curtains which were a bargainous £3 (and if you’ve read my Gro Blind review, you’ll know that they’re yet to be put up, but never mind, that’s a minor detail…!!).

From here, we also bought a cream cot bed and matching change table on top of a chest of drawers. I wouldn’t normally pick cream furniture over white pieces, but the yellow of the bedding lends itself so well to complementing the cream and gives the room a really warm and cosy feel. We haven’t yet bothered with a wardrobe, but as Baby Lighty’s outfits are now far more extensive than Mrs Lighty’s, it’s probably something we’ll need to consider in the near future!

Having chosen the Hip Hip Hooray nursery set, Mr and Mrs Lighty became slightly obsessed with the design. There was just one flaw in this plan: unbeknown to us at the time of buying the bedding, the range had been discontinued! We could have kicked ourselves for not buying the rest of the bits and pieces in the range while we still could have done, instead of waiting for our next pay days. This news wasn’t going to deter us, however; oh no, in fact I’d say it made us more determined! An every day obsession activity for Mr and Mrs Lighty was searching the internet for the range; we managed to pick up the last changing mat (which I was really pleased about, as it does finish the nursery off properly, being situated on the opposite side of the room to the cot) and the last Moses basket (which didn’t really need to match, considering it would be in with us until Baby Lighty moved into his own room, but still!!) in our local store on another one of our many visits. The one thing we were missing was the cot mobile, and on every visit we asked on the off chance if they had had any more in stock, or if any had been returned to them, and although the Babies R Us staff were always so helpful (partly why we kept going back) and would always check, we were never in luck.  I wouldn’t have minded a matching sleeping bag too, but that wasn’t the end of the world; it was the mobile that we were really upset not to have.

Mrs Lighty also kicked herself for not buying another set of the curtains while they were at £3 to make bunting from. As soon as I saw the miniature bunting on the cot bedding, I knew that I wanted to make full-size bunting to go around the top of the room as decoration. I ended up buying some neutral fabric of green and white stars, yellow and white polka dots and a ‘funky zoo’ animal print, costing much more than the £3 curtains had. As you may recall, Mrs Lighty isn’t exactly what you’d call a whizz on the sewing machine, so I decided to keep it simple and literally just cut triangles out of the material and sewed them to a length of cream ribbon. Even that proved something of a challenge; apparently Mrs Lighty can’t even manage a straight line of sewing!! Having said that, once put up, I was really pleased with the effect of the bunting.

The other decoration that we added was something that Mr and Mrs Lighty had thought about doing years before we had moved into our house, before Baby Lighty was even a twinkle in our eyes. We’d once seen some lovely framed photos of teddy bears which we said would make ideal prints for a baby’s nursery. And then Mr and Mrs Lighty had one of those mind-reading moments where we were both thinking the same thing at the same time: “when we have a baby, let’s do this with our own teddies!”, we said at the exact same moment, and years down the line, as we were finally decorating a nursery of our own, we remembered what we’d promised ourselves we’d do. Mr Lighty therefore staged a photoshoot with our special childhood teddy bears, and their photos are now in pride of place on Baby Lighty’s bedroom wall. Every morning Mrs Lighty and Baby Lighty stand and look at the photos, Baby Lighty babbling away at them. I love how the photos came out, and I’m so pleased that we remembered to do this, years down the line.

All in all, the nursery had really come together once the bunting was up, the cot was built and the photos were on the wall. If only we had that Hip Hip Hooray cot mobile! Frantically we continued our eBay and Gumtree searching, and Mrs Lighty posted on local Facebook baby groups, just in case anyone was selling one.

And then one day, about a week after Baby Lighty’s arrival, when Mrs Lighty was still breastfeeding, I did my daily Ebay search during a feed and up popped the thing I’d been searching for for months: the Hip Hip Hooray mobile! I showed Mr Lighty who just said “GET IT!! Don’t do anything else until you’ve got it!!!!!”, and so, after a teensy bit of a bidding war, the mobile was ours, ours to complete our nursery style.

It’s still a room that I love so much, and we’ve added photo frames  and a little basket of Baby Lighty’s bits and bobs to the windowsill, as well as some felt decorations made as a gift for us by Mandy at The Tinkergirl. At one point not so long ago Mr and Mrs Lighty thought they’d never get to decorate a nursery at all, so it’s definitely a room full of love. And when I see Baby Lighty reach for the tortoise hanging from the lampshade, or talking to the framed teddy bears, I’m really glad that he seems to love it too.

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