The inspiration for my daughter’s nursery started with a flamingo painting my aunt had done for me for my birthday the year before I got pregnant. My mom and I have a thing for flamingos, which is why my aunt did the painting (she’s seriously so talented!). I knew I wanted to incorporate flamingos into the nursery when we found out we were having a girl, so initially that was the direction I was going in. The theme spiraled into more of a wild animal/safari theme as I was perusing pinterest and saw a print of a baby elephant in a flower crown. From there, my creative juices just started flowing!

I loved the idea of having a colorful nursery, not just shades of pink and white, so I found things in floral prints to complement the flower crowns on the baby animal prints. I also incorporated gold accents into the room in several places. Some of my most favorite items in the nursery were Etsy finds, including the 4 baby animal prints, the bible verse print above the glider, the mobile – which was customized to include a flamingo as well as gold accents (I’m obsessed with it!), and the wooden name sign above her crib, which we spray-painted gold. Another one of my favorite things in the nursery is the glider, which I happened to find at Babies R Us a few days before our local store closed for good. It was literally the only glider they had left in the store that wasn’t a floor model – in fact, they didn’t have a floor model of it so I bought it based on seeing the fabric in the box and looking up a picture of it online to see what it looked like put together. It was discounted to only $100 so even though I wasn’t sure it would fit in the nursery all that well, I couldn’t pass up the deal so I took a chance on it and I’m so glad I did! It not only looks great, it’s also super comfortable. I got a lot of the rest of the decor at my favorite store, Target, and all of the stuffed safari animals were gifted to Baby Reagan by my step-daughter from her collection.

Overall, splurging on a few items on Etsy and saving by shopping at Target or using decor we already had resulted in us not spending a ton but still creating a nursery we love, and we hope our daughter loves as she gets older. I hope she can grow into the room, and if she’s anything like the rest of her family she will be an animal lover so I hope she’ll love what we came up with for a long time.