Good Ikea

Over the weekend, I made a run to Ikea with Lotus.  We purchased some good quality shelving for Ladybug for Mother's Day.  Now, I know that plenty of people have been to Ikea, and many of them have taken advantage of the cafe, and all those sample rooms.  This was the first time I was able to take advantage of Småland, which is where you can deposit your children while you shop.  It was great!  I had to get some rather hefty items out of the self-serve furniture warehouse, and doing so without having to monitor a kid, or risk dropping a 400 ton (artistic license) crate of bookshelf parts on her, well, that was the best part of all.  I was even able to go out an load all this stuff into my car before extracting her forcibly from the ball pit.  She didn't want to leave.  Well, she never does. 

Shopping with small kids is a royal pain in the ass.  There is no two ways about that.  They're always running around, and the risk of them getting lost is high.  In a store like Ikea it's even higher, since it's laid out like a maze with a thousand corners where a kid could hide.  Honestly, they should have a midnight game of laser tag (or possibly låser tåg) in there some night.  How cool would that be?  Anyway, of course, every parent knows exactly why Ikea provides a service like this: it's so the parents have the time to slow down, and look a the stuff, rather than looking for the kids.  And if you're looking at the stuff, you soon realized that, well, those watering cans would really solve that issue with the kids fighting over who gets the watering can.  And then you end up leaving with two bookshelves (which you came in for), a pair of garbage cans, a hanging shelf for the kid's room, two watering cans and a blue egg chair.  For the cost of paying three girls to watch my kid for 30 minutes (I had up to 90 minutes), Ikea sold me an extra $100 worth of stuff.  This was, except for the watering cans, all stuff we needed.  It was not my intention to get them at Ikea, mostly because I wasn't thinking about anything except the bookshelves.  But by eliminating the need for me to think about monitoring Lotus while I got the bookshelves, I was able to think, hey, those garbage cans are just what we need.  Oh, right, and Ladybug wanted the blue egg chair for the nursery.  And that shelf, yes, that will go nicely in the kid's room for their non-play-thing-knick-knacks (they have music box snow globes from Disneyland that really shouldn't be accessible to them all the time).

Very clever, Ikea.  Very clever.