August | 2013 | SidebySide Photography

so with decorating our baby room, i’ve been obsessed with doing as much DIY as possible, and decorating with random finds. it’s been really fun putting it all together and i’ll have a post dedicated to the room soon! but for now, just a post on my old crib 🙂

my parents saved my old crib all these years thinking it would be fun for me to use it for my kids someday. of course they never knew that there would be laws about drop-side cribs and all that so they took it out of the rafters and asked me what we should do with it. i quickly ‘pinterested’ and saw some fun ideas of what you can do with old cribs.

here are my brother and i looking super weird in the crib, crazy kis!

and hopefully my mom doesn’t kill me for putting a belly pic up but that’s me in there, so fun!!

this brings me to my dad. his love language towards others is acts of service. all you have to do is talk about a fun project and before you know it, he’s out in the garage helping you bring your idea reality. it helps that he is super creative and talented. all i did was show him a picture and he went right to work on taking apart the old crib.

my mom took some behind the scenes pics for me 🙂

so he made a cool bench out of the crib, and the other color wood was a piece of wood leftover from when we got some new shelves, he’s so resourceful!!

then it came to me and i painted it to match the other furniture in the nursery. i did chalk paint, sanded it after, and waxed it.

and to finish it off, sewed a pillow and pad (well dez mostly did the pad) to match some other things in the room. can’t wait to show you the whole room!

voila!! what do you think of my repurposed crib? great for a little reading seat?

almost exactly a year ago, we were visiting hiroshima and miyajima. so i’m posting this on the anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima.

traveling is so easy in japan, even though we had to figure out the system in each city (because the JR tickets don’t work everywhere). here, we took trolley cars like in san fransisco. there were more tourists here than any other place we visited on this trip besides tokyo and we met an americanji on the trolley. it’s always nice meeting other americans when traveling because we usually always like chatting. we also met a little japanese girl at breakfast who wanted to come over and say ‘hello’

more indoor malls, the japanese love their indoor malls!

the a-bomb dome. crazy that this is just right in the middle of the city. but what’s more crazy is that the bomb basically took out the entire city of hiroshima, and 67 years later, the city has increased six times its previous size! it’s a beautiful park with really great memorials to commemorate the day and wish for peace.

i love how everything was so linear, see how you can see the dome in the background below..

for dinner, we were recommended hiroshima style okonomiyaki. that literally translates to ‘as you like it’ they are like crepes on the bottom with cabbage and noodles, then you add anything you want to it. we did eggs, cheese and green onions and they make it right in front of you. it reminded me of a tostada, and we shared it, it was delicious! they came to be during WWII when the troops introduced flour to japan.

that night we wandered into an area labeled on the map ‘night life area’. we thought it might be a good place to grab a drink or a snack…turns out it was pretty sketch and was more than likely a red light district…whoops!! so we headed back to the covered mall and hung out at a three story starbucks instead.

we had also found out about a really cool island right off the coast. we were heading to our next destination after, so unfortunately we had to carry all our bags. but it was still a cool little random side trip. we took a boat (which took our JR passes!) and there were these temple gates in the water (o-torii gate).

surprise, there are tons of deer everywhere. at first we (ok probably only me) were excited to see them, and they were tame so you could pet them, which of course i love. but we soon realized that these deer are basically pests. if you plan to grab any food, you are suddenly surrounded by them and they start pulling at your clothes or anything you have with you. one chewed a hole in my bag.

here’s the bag this deer ripped into…there wasn’t even any food in there!!

this island is known for their flavor filled ‘cookies’. they had a variety, as you can see below. we loved the sea eel one…kidding! we got chocolate 🙂