Choosing a nursery theme for your baby can be an exciting task, as you anticipate the day your little one will arrive. One of the joys of pregnancy for many parents is setting up the nursery. It is said that pregnant women tend to want to “nest” towards the end of their pregnancy, which of course can mean anything from Spring cleaning to completely re-painting the nursery, but for most it just means creating a special space for their new baby.

If you know you are having a boy or a girl, you may choose to go with a gendered baby theme, such as a farm tractor theme for a baby boy, or – sticking to the animal theme – a gentler baby animal farm theme for a girl. Of course, if you are a fan of the tractor, you can have those for a girl too, but be prepared for people to assume you were expecting to have a boy.

Some other common baby boy bedding themes include:

• Jungle animals
• Winnie the Pooh – classic or Disney
• Cars, planes and automobiles
• A moon and stars theme

Yes, any of these can be gender neutral, with the possible exception of the transporation theme (though plenty of girls like toy cars just as much as their brothers).

When choosing your nursery theme, a few points to bear in mind are:

• Newborns can only see sharp contrasts, so that lovely pastel colored mobile is probably not going to attract his attention much in the first weeks. They also can’t focus well on anything that is too far away.
• You might not want to make the place your baby will sleep overly stimulating anyway. So having a bright, high contrast mobile over the change table may be a sanity saver (changing an unhappy newborn’s diaper can be challenging), you may actually want those pastels when it comes to the bedding.
• A very strongly themed room will not age as well as a more neutral room. So theming the bedding and other accessories and keeping the paint and furniture more neutral can be a good compromise.
• When deciding how much to decorate, consider also whether your baby is going to be staying in this room indefinitely, or will he be moved on when the next baby comes. And if so, is your next baby going to be subjected to his hand-me-down tractor theme, or will you want to pick out something different from her?

Above all, make sure picking out your nursery theme is a joyful process. If it is costing too much or proving too hard, the joy can be taken out. All you really need is somewhere for your baby to sleep quietly, and something to distract him while you change his diaper. The rest is icing.