Household Happiness: JT's Bedroom

Though I'm often surprised to realize it was that long ago, ten years ago this fall I was getting a room ready for a baby.   I chose art that was a bit unusual for a nursery.  Rather than go for babyish things, I wanted a room that could grow up with the baby.  I started by framing some photos I'd bought from an artist at a craft fair, probably in Nashville, though I can't be sure.  I do recall that I'd had the pictures long before my baby was expected and when I knew that I was pregnant, I planned the room around them.  One of the pictures is of a small red chair at a table. 

The other is of a blue-spotted bowl.

For the better part of the pregnancy, the gender of my babine was unknown.  But in late November an ultrasound revealed all.   Soon after, I bought and framed a poster illustrated by the same artist who drew the covers for the Harry Potter books sold in the United States.  The poster, a picture of a boy astride his bike, riding through the sky with a backpack filled with books on his back, was just what I imagined when I thought of my boy.  I spent a lot of that pregnancy idly wondering what kind of person my baby would be.  But about one thing, I was confident: I would teach him to love stories.

When I brought home my barely 8 pound baby and showed him the pictures in his room I could hardly imagine that I would some day have such a big boy.  But the evidence suggests that's exactly what I've got these days.  The poster and the pictures still hang in the room where JT sleeps.  It's not a nursery anymore, of course.  The blue walls and the wide, white-trimmed windows are the room of a busy, imaginative boy.

At night, just before I go to bed, I check on the boy sleeping in this room. Most nights, I can see a shadow of the baby he once was in the soft curve of his cheek.  And big boy that he is, he'll always be my baby.