Nursery and Toddler Room Essentials

We are putting the finishing touches to our brand new little girl's bedroom.  It has been a lot of fun designing a room suitable for a preschooler and a school age child but there is a little part of me that feels sad that we are finally saying goodbye to the nursery.  Having tidied away the changing unit and the cot, I've realised that there are actually a good few of our nursery essentials that I still can't live without.  So this week I've teamed up with Tesco to share some of our nursery essentials that we still use now - these are the things that have seen us through the first years of parenthood and are still going strong.

Blackout curtains:  The very first thing that we bought for the new kids bedroom was a pair of nice thick blackout blinds.  We've learned over the years that, without almost complete darkness, it is very hard to convince a toddler to go to bed...and even harder to convince them to go back to sleep if they wake up early in the morning!

Safety gate:  Even though Holly can make her way up and down the stairs unaided now, it will be some time before we remove the stair gate from the hallway. A safety gate at the top of the stairs is useful from the very first day that your baby crawls, right up until they are school-aged as a protection against accidents.  We also use a safety gate at the bottom of the stairs to put the girls off straying upstairs when we would really rather they didn't and we used to keep it on the kitchen door to prevent them straying into the kitchen while we were cooking.

Night light:  I first bought a dimmable night light when I was breast-feeding.  I would take Lara with me into the nursery so that we didn't disturb Daddy and I'd sit in the gentle light and simply tap the light off when I left the room.  As Lara grew older and moved into her own room, I found it useful to have a small light to leave on as we read her a story in her cot, or if we struggled to settle her to sleep.  These days our night light is used to bring light at reading time or to help set the gentle mood for bedtime and get the girls into the mood for sleep.  They don't really need to keep a night light on after bed time but sometimes it does offer them both a little bit of comfort.

Cotbed:  Gosh, our cotbed has done us proud; it is one we inherited from close family and now, after having slept three different children it is still going strong.  It has been brilliant to see both of our girls grow up in their cotbed while it is in cot mode and then, after a few difficult first nights of freedom, settle into the cotbed in bed mode.  

Within the next week we will finally dismantle our cotbed and store it away in the loft for another day.  My little baby will be moving into her first single bed!  I can't quite believe it.