Ikea Did Not Fix My Problem

Dear Ikea,

I am stumped, flummoxed, and generally uncomprehensive as to how I managed to spend half of my Sunday and over one hundred thirty of my dollars in your never-ending consumer madhouse and yet still have dirty laundry on the floor of my apartment. The mind reels.

It all began with the pre-Ikea beverage stop, during which Boy 1 managed to frival away the majority of his allowance on a Mega-blok Halo mini-figure and I started the day strong with a cold can of Starbucks expresso. If anyone can explain to me why I will drive miles out of the way to spend only a dollar on my diet coke at McDonald's but gladly throw down almost three bucks for iced coffee in a can, I would be glad to hear it. But I digress.

En route, I mange to also drop off an overdue library book which I had checked out weeks ago under the unrealistic impression that I would have an opportunity to read anything other than student papers and my Facebook feed. Consider my late fee as an act of negligent philanthropy.

Finally, at the stroke of 10:15, we arrive in your parking lot an amazing 45 minutes after our ETA. Fabulous. It appears that every single person in Orange County (and their mom) also decided to visit Europe's most difficult to assemble furnature emporium on their Monday off of work. Things just keep looking better and better.

Inside, my eldest child steadfastly refuses to enter Småland, the children's jail/enclosure built especially for him and the children of the three million other upper-middle class women who have decided to attempt to organize their belonging this weekend. "I want to stay with youuuuu, Mommy," he cries. Fabulous. He loves me so much he won't leave me F alone. Awesome.

So, I progress, with the toddler, the big one, and a cart with a giant yellow bag into the abyss that is Ikea, Costa Mesa. We start at the cafeteria, where they refuse to provide Coke products but have an abundance of free butter and thirty-nine cent dinner rolls. The big one agrees to share the food he wants to order before it is purchased, refuses to share while it is warm enough to eat, then offers his picked-over remains up gladly once nothing on his plate is any longer eatable. We are clearly on a roll of our very own at this point. I forget exactly when I offer the little one a butter-filled dinner roll extravaganza only to remember mid-digestion that he is supposed to be off of dairy. The hits just keep on hitting.

(To be continued....)

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you very much for your comment! I look forward to approving it.

Popular posts from this blog

Haircuts Are More Than Just Shorter Hair

Image
I cut the baby's hair yesterday. It wasn't the first time, but it was the most significant. Previously, I had simply trimmed, shortened his baby curls in a formation that allowed for at least cursory containment. But now, I have done the irreversible. His baby curls are gone, likely to never return, and with this unique action, with the use of a simple machine to trim and cut and shape, he has irrevocably left the baby world for the world of an older sort. He has become, with no reservations, a toddler. In the conservative Jewish tradition, a boy's hair is not cut until he is three year's old. Once he has arrived at this ripe old age, there is a ceremony called an  upshernish , an event in which members of the religious community ceremoniously cut the child's hair, a symbolic cutting away of  infancy as the small human enters into childhood and the beginning of his formal education. It is at this point that the boy...
Read more

Building Community with a Non-binding Vote

Image
As my little blog has now earned its first pennies, I thought it time to spend more than 3,000% of my earnings on business cards while simultaneously keeping my day job. However, here is where you, dear reader, can contribute and show your love for my continued reflections and rantings. Here, you can take a moment of your precious life to vote on which style of card from the "Elegent" list on Vistaprint best embodies the style, mood, and tone of my illustrious blog.  Yes, I know what you're thinking. How could one tiny rectangle of heavyweight cardstock possibly do justice to all that my blog contains? Well, obviously, or at least hopefully, it can't, but at least you can have some input as to which example does the least crappy job. I will take all votes into consideration, then do whatever I want to do anyway. Artists and writers are fickle and capricious like that. And with all seriousness, thank you for reading my blog. It brings me great joy to know that...
Read more

Victims of Anger

Angry people do angry things. They throw papers off of the table, Scatter dinner across the floor, And refuse to brush their teeth, Unconcerned by the consiquences. The older one sings a song Despite requests for quiet. He repeats, louder each time, Disrupting the ever-shrinking peace. The small one cries. Not the cry of the sad, but the cry of the angry. Angry that he is small; angry that he cannot speak, And his anger seethes out, staining the hopeful darkness of the night. No one rests. No one sleeps. Everyone lives in the angry, vengeful rage. And yet, we still dream of sleep... Peaceful, restorative sleep. Perhaps, one day, it will come, As easily as the sunset, As quiet as the moon. Until then, we suffer, Victims of our own choices. Victims of the children we were born to love.
Read more