How to pick a paint color and a baby’s name

We have now begun, in earnest, improving this new little home of ours.  Last week we painted both the living room and the family room.  We started with the family room, which didn’t quiteturn out like I had hoped.  The color, I love.  What I don’t love is how the beige-greenish, khaki sort of color that I chose makes the was-cool-in-the-early-90s very light bleached wood trim (the trim that’s everywhere, by the way, the crown moulding, baseboards, large built in book cases…everywhere) look very, very pink.  So yes, our family room is now green and pink.  Lovely.  But this is totally fine as it is now forcing us to paint all that woodwork white, like we wanted to do one day, but just didn’t think it would be so soon.  But yes, soon it will be as it’s looking a little crazy in its current state.

So after the family room painting debacle I sort of got a little freaked out and paranoid about picking the color for the living room, as I did not want to make another mistake and pick the wrong color, or pick a color that was going to severely clash with something else in the room (thank goodness all the trim in that room is already white).  So after really stressing myself out over it, bringing home multiple paint chips and little sample containers which I painted in little squares all over the wall, Matt said to me, “You know, we didn’t even spend this much time picking out Nate’s name.”

And he’s right.  When I was pregnant I simply made out a long list of names I liked, handed it to Matt and said, “Pick one.”  He scanned the list once, said, ”I like Nathaniel,” and that’s how Nate became Nate.  And really it could have been no other way.  He could not be more Nate even if he tried.  That kid is just a Nate.

So anyway, Matt was tired of my indeciveness about the color of the living room so he said we should just paint it the same color we had painted Nate’s bedroom, and we did, and it’s perfect.  This is how we should handle all of the big decisions in our life: I will make a list (or paint a bunch of options on the wall) of all the solutions I would be perfectly fine with, then just let Matt decide.  It seems to be working well for us.