So what about the messed up canvas, you ask?  Well, I wasn't about to let the $5 that I spent on that canvas go to waste.  I painted the entire thing green and then my almost 3 year old son had a blast painting his own creation over the canvas.  I had him use colors that are in the kids' bathroom and we hung his "masterpiece" on the wall.  It is no Picasso, by any means, but my  little guy is so proud of that painting that he will go into the bathroom just to look at it.  And to all you moms out there that are or have ever potty trained a boy...anything that I can do to make him excited to go into the bathroom works for me!

By the way, my son says that his painting is a picture of me and him...hmm...I'll assume that I hadn't showered yet on the day that he painted his creation.

Some days I feel like I should be a walking advertisement for Pottery Barn Kids.  I get so excited when I get their magazines in my mailbox, somehow thinking that my kids' rooms will magically look like all the ideas that I love, without having to actually spend the money on the items that I see in the magazine.  Well, I'm currently working on getting a nursery ready for our 2nd little bundle that is supposed to arrive around April 30th.  We are having a girl, and of course I fell in love with a ton of ideas that I found in the Pottery Barn magazine, once again.   Being on a strict budget and being even further convicted about our finances, since we are going through Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University at the moment, I had to come up with cheap, easy ways that I could somehow re-create some of my favorite PBK ideas.  Here are pictures of a few of my attempts.  

If you have a girl or just like to look through the PBK magazine, like me, you may have seen the flower painted canvases that they sell for about $200.  I just loved them and they go perfectly with the nursery bedding that we purchased.  My first attempt to re-create the pictures failed miserably.  I cut my own stencil by tracing some of the flowers off the bedding that we got and then tried to paint over the stencil onto the canvas.  You can see from the pictures that it didn't work at all.  I think the stencil paper was either too thin or I somehow really messed up.  

Back to square one...I then traced lightly (using the stencil that I had made) onto the remaining canvases with pencil and ended up filling in the drawing with paint.  It took longer than it would have taken if my brilliant stencil idea would have worked, but I think it turned out cute.  Not perfect, by any means, but it looks great on the nursery wall and didn't cost me even close to $200.