Welcome to 'The Jungle'

Article 2 of the mural series

When we discovered that Cedi was going to be a big sister, and soon, we started to prepare her
for the fact that she was going to be living in “the Jungle” instead of “Under the
Sea”. I had previously painted all of the animals on the wall,
but I had yet to find the proper inspiration for the leaves and vines. I started to paint something that I wasn’t ‘feeling’ and it just didn’t look right so I stopped (for about a year). Luckily, in December 07 inspiration struck (Capri was born February 08) and I was able to FINALLY finish the jungle and paint the leafy vines all over the wall. I had a small dilemma with the angled portions of the ceiling because they have this crazy texture that made painting in any sort of straight lines near impossible (for me at least). I used a leafy rug from my college days to cover up the biggest portion of the angled ceiling and then I did some draping with some hand-dyed netting near the other portions. I also trimmed the top edges with Hawaiian leis to cover up the imperfections of my paint job between the flat ceiling and the angled ceiling. I personally think it worked out well.

When Cedi moved into the jungle, she LOVED it! She was just learning animal noises so in the morning when she woke up we would often times hear roaring through the monitor! As you can see a lion peeked at her through the crib bars!

A few weeks before Cedi turned 2, she was very angry with the fact that we had put her to bed for the evening and she decided to climb out of the crib. Of course, she hit her head on the only possible thing that could cut her in the area, sliced it open and bled EVERYWHERE! It was definitely one of the scariest moments thus far in motherhood. Once we were able to see where she was bleeding from, we discovered it was a ridiculously small cut that required nothing more than a band-aide and a kiss (thankfully). That night, I took the crib down and moved her into the big girl bed. I tried to get her to sleep on the lower trundle, but no matter what I did (big girl blankets, special sheets, special pillow) she always climbed up into the double. Now she spends her nights sleeping in the alcove next to the monkey on the wall. The quilt you see in the picture to the left was made for Cedi by my mother-in-law. It is absolutely beautiful! The quilting, done by my aunt-in-law, Barb (http://www.quiltsbybarb.com/) is more than you can imagine. She quilted my daughter’s first and middle name into it as well as the proper textures for the tree, animals, and even added some more animals and jungley objects into the stitching! Absolutely beautiful! I think I’ll have to take some better close ups of the quilt and do a story on that itself!

I hope you enjoyed the second article in my mural series! Next time I’ll talk about the second ‘under the sea’ room I completed!