IKEA!

I have a love affair with IKEA.  You can literally furnish an entire house with one stop shopping.  What's not to love?  Plus it's cheap.  So when something happens to it, I don't feel bad.  I needed to make an emergency IKEA run, so Pookie, my aunt and I hopped into the truck and took off.  I love it when Rob lets me drive his pick-up.  I play a game of "whose truck is bigger?".  I like it when "my truck is bigger than your truck".  For whatever reason, I take great enjoyment in that.  Sometimes it's all about the little things.  (For those of you who are wondering, Rob has three trucks.  Two dump trucks and a pick-up.  He uses the pick-up as his personal truck.) 

At the store, I was a gal on a mission.  I had gone on-line over the weekend and came up with a list of things that I needed.  Yes, I needed a list.  It was two pages and it really came in handy!  We got through the showroom floor fairly quickly.  It really helped that we just cut through to the children's section.  Even with my list, all sorts of other really cute things ended up in my bag.  My best buy is a $0.99 picture frame that is double-sided.  I did manage to restrain myself a little.  There were these little kid chairs that were on sale for $9.99, and normally they are $24.99.  They were such cute chairs!  But alas, cute kid chairs were not part of my emergency run.  I think that may be a trip for another day... 

The downstairs marketplace was another story entirely.  You really have to take your time and look at everything.  I love the way it's set up.  Whomever designed the IKEA stores was really thinking.  They have maximized the amount of time that you look at a product and they show it to you in two different formats.  I love going into other peoples homes and seeing how they've decorated.  By using things, you get ideas for things to do in your own home.  IKEA has completely capitalized on that.  Then for the people that need to look at all of the options, there is the marketplace where you can see all of the fill-in-the-blank together.  IKEA has strategic places to eat.  There are free baby diapers in the bathrooms in case of emergencies.  You can buy baby food in the main restaurant!  This place is set up so you can spend a whole day there. 

The only downside is you have to bring everything home and assemble it yourself.  Luckily this isn't too big a problem for me, see for mentioned truck.  Plus, I LOVE assembling things!  I know, I'm odd, but it's fun to see how things go together.  It's all about the little things.  There was some concern today about the trip home.  Not because I was worried about transport, but before I left the house the news said something about rain.  The weather people around here don't have the best track record, and I didn't plan on staying long.  Well wouldn't you know, we stayed longer then planned, and it started raining when the weatherman predicted it would.  Go figure.  My aunt's solution was to keep the truck in motion so the rain would fly off the windshield and miss the truck bed.  We got stuck in rush hour traffic.  Luckily the items in the back seem to be none the worst for wear.