I don't think I realized just how cliche we were being with the color of the room until I got about halfway through the first wall. I looked back at what I had painted and realized, "Wow! This is a perfect baby blue."

We actually picked that blue not because it was the standard baby blue, but rather because it was a perfect neutral soothing background against the green rainforest mural Michelle had painted on one wall. Early on, as the mural began to take shape, I suggested that perhaps a nice blue sky would complement the mural perfectly.

At first, Michelle balked. She wanted to carry the green from the mural throughout the room. But though the green was rather pleasing and cheerful as the background of one muralized wall, the thought of it covering the entire room began to make me feel claustraphobic.

To top matter off, a few months back, while digging through a bin of Oops! paint, paint that for one reason or another was not acceptable to the original buyers, Michelle had found a perfect sky blue. One afternoon, frustrated at the bare white walls, she had managed to roll it across perhaps two-thirds of the room. Even though it was reject paint, the basic color worked against her green mural.

So tonight we headed over to the massive orange hardware warehouse and picked up a gallon of Celestial blue paint. It was a pretty damn near perfect match to the Oops paint, only a bit warmer and in a nice dull flat finish to hide all the imperfections in the wall.

All told, it only took three hours tonight to coat the walls to satisfaction with a rich sky blue. After looking the room over, Michelle agreed clouds just might look nice.

But that's a job for tomorrow, along with assembling the crib and painting the floor. Not necessarily in that order.