My sweetie boy is growing up....

I found out today that Tanner has grown 4 inches so far this school year. That is just crazy to me. He keeps telling me he is almost as tall as I am and before long he will be right.

I have also seen the outward signs of his growing up emotionally. When we first moved in to our house, Tanner was about 8 months old. I decided to paint something fun on his wall to make his room more interesting.



I like Tigger so his crib bedding had Tigger on it. (We always thought it was cool that Tigger is T-I-double G -er and Tanner is T-A-double n-er.) I decided to try to paint a Tigger on his wall. Much to my surprise, it turned out pretty good even if I do say so myself. I then painted little dashes around the room to make it look like Tigger had bounced around the room. And Tanner's room version 1 was born.

I have to tell you that Tigger will probably always be on his wall. It will be my reminder of my little boy. I just can't bear to paint over it.


Fast forward about 3 years and we have a little boy who loves transportation. Planes, trains, cars, boats, you name it. So, the Tigger bounces were painted over and I painted a mural of a city on his wall.

This took me quite a lot of work and Tanner was so proud of his city and especially the blue Wiggles truck on the road. He was a Wiggles fanatic whether he will admit it now or not.

Unfortunately, now that he is almost 8, the Wiggles truck is definitely not cool anymore. Tanner and I put our heads together and came up with a new plan for the room. He got to use the paint roller to put the first paint on the wall. Wouldn't you know it....he went straight for theWiggles truck. To see a video clip of this you can go to my husband's blog at www.stevebarth.blogspot.com

It didn't take much to come up with the new plan. Tanner's new obsession is Ben 10. Ben is a cartoon character that is able to change in to aliens to fight bad guys. The colors for Ben 10 are black, gray and lime green. Yep, that is the new big boy room. I got out the sewing machine and sewed some curtains. I even designed them myself! And a little bit of extra fabric got the bedspread to match. We also decided to pull out the desk from his loft bed now that he is old enough to have homework all the time.

For the main wall, we painted an Omnitrex (which is what Ben uses to change in to the aliens) surrounded by the silhouettes of 18 of the aliens Ben can change in to. It was a lot of work too. But it is definitely a bigger boy room.

I got all the aliens painted. Some parts were traced from printed out copies of the aliens and some parts just had to be free handed.

I thought my hand was going to fall off by the time I was finished. It was a lot of fine detail work. And I thought it would be easier than the city was! Shows you how much I know.
Here are some thoughts from Tanner himself:

I like how all the aliens look. The one I think looks really cool is Wildvine because it looks like mom worked really hard on him. It is better than the city. I like the Omnitrex in the middle. It was a really good idea. It looks like my mom worked very hard.

Back to mom.


We added in some extra organizational stuff and declared it finished.

No one ever said being a mom would be easy. It is hard to see him growing up so fast. I miss that sweet little boy that used to beg me to wait at the train tracks to wait for the "bing bings" to come down. Funny thing is, I am sure a day will come when I will long for the days when he had a lime green room with an omnitrex on the wall. It is hard to imagine but it will be here before we know it.

That is why I hold on to Tigger. And I am grateful to have a little boy that still loves to cuddle with his mama. There is nothing better.