First Trip to Ikea

Uggh. Sick again! Friday I woke up with a store throat & could barely stay awake all day. I've had some dizziness, nausea, fever, etc., but have fared pretty well as long as I stay parked on the couch. After 6 days the sore throat is still sticking around, but otherwise I mostly feel better.

And somehow in the midst of that, we managed to make our first trip to Ikea! (before I noticed the fever, whoops) I drooled over Ikea catalogs years before we had one in our state. Unfortunately, by the time we got one, we also had a baby, and none of us were up for the 1+ hour car trip there. (Or we had no money, and what's the point of going if you can't buy *something*.) Luckily our new house puts us about half an hour away.

My son's upcoming 5th birthday was the round about cause of this spontaneous trip. He's been sleeping in a convertible crib/toddler bed the last few years and it was way past time to get this tall boy an upgrade. We've been eyeing the Kura loft for a while, and managed to snag a used one (with the canopy) off of Craigslist for half price on Friday.



We put it together the next morning and our kids had a blast climbing and playing in it... Until the 2 year old fell on her butt coming down the ladder and got too nervous to go up & down without our help. Which she still wanted to do, a lot! We planned on adding a Trofast shelf to use as stairs later on, like this, and so we suddenly found ourselves heading out the door with Swedish meatballs on our mind.



We'd heard that Ikea is massive, but that really doesn't prepare you for the scale of things. There's a parking garage for the store, people! We grabbed a map and came across the shelves first thing, then wandered half of one floor before we were ravenous and hightailed it through the 2nd half to get back to the cafeteria. With 2 crazy kids and a sickly mom, we weren't up for perusing the 2nd floor, though we did make a quick stop by the lighting section, where we picked up the Exploding Death Star lamp ~


(Image via Gizmodo.)

We wove through the rest of the floor towards the exit, found our shelves in the warehouse, checked out, and snacked on some cinnamon buns. With the half hour drive there, the whole trip probably took about 4 hours. Still feeling a little overwhelmed as we drove past the line of flags on the way out, we decided Ikea is definitely large enough to be it's own city. I'm sure it won't be too long before we brave the store again, but you can bet we'll be dropping Orson off in the kid's play area!