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When designing a nursery it is important to get a good balance between a space that is inviting and stimulating for your baby, but also a practical environment that makes it easy to perform all the tasks you will need to do in order to take care of your baby.

A lot of this can be done with your decorating choices. An easy way to go about it is choosing a theme, maybe animals or a favorite children’s character, and buying furniture and decorations that fit this. Having a theme will make choosing everything from the bedding to the blankets easy, but you do run the risk of creating a room that feels a little generic. If you have a little more time and are feeling a little more creative an alternative is to choose one special item to act as a focal point, for example, a rug or a painting. Then you can choose the rest of your decor to fit around that. Whichever way you pick the room’s decor, make sure that you do not let design get in the way of practicalities. A room full of exciting and wonderful toys can be great for stimulating your baby’s imagination, but if you go over the top, it can be difficult to keep the room tidy. You need to make sure you leave space for all the essential things you need, such as a crib, a chair and a changing table!

Exciting purple netting over the window may be great for creating a princess theme, but if you want to help your baby take naps during the day (which hopefully she will!) you need to be able to darken the room. One way to do this would be with thick blackout curtains. In this case, a good way to compromise between style and practicality is looking into roller blinds. Blinds can darken a room, but they still leave space for more stylish window dressings.

You could also opt for a number of homemade decorations and accessories, using personal photographs to decorate the room, or choosing to use your mom’s hand knitted blanket instead of buying the one with the cartoon giraffe on. All of these help make the room feel like your baby's own and serve a practical purpose. Your child is more likely to enjoy these kinds of decorations as he or she gets older and grows out of some of the very babyish themes many nurseries are decorated in. The longer you expect your decorations to last, the better value anything you do buy will be.

So sometimes it is best to go with simple colors, and hang photographs over these rather than choose wall paper with children’s nursery rhyme characters. This way when your children get older, and Humpty Dumpty is no longer appropriate, it is just a matter of changing the pictures rather than having to redecorate the entire room. Whatever you choose there can be little doubt that when your children grow older and have children of their own they will look back on their own nursery fondly and use it as their inspiration.