Dan's Papers -March 27, 2009 -

With the incredible array of flooring materials available today, there'a a wide choice of what to use in junior's room. Having gone through the stages from infancy to elementary school, I have some experience and information to share.

The first thing to consider is, what room are we talking about? Is it the nursery or bedroom where, basically, the child sleeps? Or is it a playroom, separate from sleeping quarters, where the baby will be fed, and the toddler will have his snacks and play? How will you, your child and the rest of the family use the room? What will be the "rules?"

In a bedroom where a child will basically sleep and get dressed, your options are wider - you can take the risk of a nice rug or carpet. But remember, little ones do get sick and have accidents. (By the way, there's a pet product, Nature's Miracle, that's great for those 'organic' messes.)

Since we had the luxury of having separate play and sleep rooms for our son, we went with a nice looking wool area rug in the bedroom. Because the room had minimal use, we could take the risk that an occasional spill could be cleaned up, while providing a soft, safe surface where our son could practice supervised crawling/walking. The only thing I'd recommend here is pattern. It hides potential stains better than solids. Small subtle patterns in darker, less contrasting colors are optimal. Also, unless you know your child has an allergy, go with natural fabrics. Synthetics can contain toxic chemicals that can be unpleasant at best, dangerous at worst. Forget shag carpeting. Leave that for the room with the waterbed.

The real issue is the playroom, where we tried everything in the book. By far the worst option was those interlocking, 1-foot foam rubber squares. They come in multiple colors and may have removable numbers, letters or in our case, dinosaurs inlaid. The dinosaurs were multi-colored, and could involve as many as 10 parts. Ideally, the child can take them out of the square like puzzle pieces, and put them back together. It's fun, safe, soft and very cheap.

So how is it a problem? Let me count the ways.

Too much going on: Too many colors, too patchwork quilt-ish, just too damn busy. Basically, in a 10 x 12 room, you would have 120 garish puzzles on the floor - up to 1,200 pieces. It makes it impossible to find all the other little toy parts you will invariably waste hours of your life searching for, as your toddler screams, "But I need the other yellow piece! I NEED it!"

Gets dirty: The soft, porous foam rubber seemed to be a dirt magnet. Also, sand and dirt easily got underneath the thing. And you can't vacuum under it without dislodging dozens of pieces.

May cause insanity: Let me just tell you that one day, my overactive mind that had to constantly be quieted to focus only on our toddler son, rebelled. I just couldn't take the mismatched mish-mosh of color. I ended up pulling up all the T-Rex pieces and tried to reconfigure them by color - so that the orange square housed an all-orange T-Rex. The red - all red. As you can imagine, it didn't work. I had a red square with a mostly red T-Rex, except for a purple leg and yellow head. I almost lost it.

The next day I drove to Pottery Barn outlet in Riverhead and found a beautiful, 9 x 12 sage green, thick pile wool rug - on sale for just 200 bucks. I forced it into the back of my car, got home, and after a few cups of coffee, pulled up the horrible puzzle mat (which is the ultimate haz mat - to your sanity), vacuumed up the layer of sand and dirt that had fallen in between the cracks, and rolled out the serene carpet.

Instant tranquility. A calm, broad swath of color that was comfortable, cozy, soft and safe.

We had also tried a patterned rug in the playroom, but again - because of the toys and clutter, it jut added to the noise. A good quality carpet is my recommendation. And a good set of rules about eating in the kitchen only.