IKEA

I love IKEA. In Sweden. On a weekday. Not in NJ on a Saturday. I was so excited about this trip. Finally a little bit of home in this new country. (Can I still call it new after 6 years? Probably not. But anyways...) We get there and the play area where you can drop your kids off is called Småland. Home sweet home. We start by eating lunch. A boatload of Swedish meatballs. Mmmmm. We accidentally left E's bib in the car, but it's IKEA. They have bib's for you. (They even have diapers for you in the changing area.) After lunch we let E play in the play corner at the restaurant. She loved it! Then the shopping began... And that's when I realized how different it was from home. The layout of the store here was dumb. We started on the first floor. (Very messy btw.) Filled up our shopping cart and to get to the 2nd floor you had to take the elevator. No ramps here. No. And you can't bring shopping carts to the 2nd floor. It's just a showroom for you to look at and pick out what you want. I guess you're suppose to start on the 2nd floor and work your way down. We brought our cart to the 2nd floor anyway. E wasn't very happy in the cart. She wanted to play in all the beds. And not stay close to us. And we could not find a wardrobe that we liked. So we decided to go with a PAX system. It's one of those things you can totally customize to your needs. If you ever go to get one of those, figure out ahead of time exactly what you want. Do not try to do it with a hyper toddler running away from you. We had no idea what to do. So we took E back to the restaurant where she could play. C went to get a catalog and from that we were able to figure out what we wanted. Then we walked back to some guy by a desk by the PAX department and told him what we wanted. And he knew exactly what he was doing! He printed out a list for us so we knew where everything was that we had to pick up. We got our stuff. Payed (a little bit more than we had planned to do - oops!) packed everything into the minivan we had rented for this occasion and went back in to shop some more. That's right. We had to pick up a few thing in the Swedish food market too. Lingondricka, gräddbullar, leksand knäckebröd, flädersaft, ballerinakex... And then we went home. And my wonderful husband spent all day yesterday putting it all together. So my plans for today are to unpack our clothes. And to get our guestroom ready for my mother-in-law. C asked me yesterday if she knew that we live in a total mess. I told him that if not she would soon find out.

I still love IKEA. In Sweden. On a weekday. And I wish they would open one up in this area so I can give the American version a chance on a weekday too.