Tonight I fell in love all over again... with IKEA.
And it wasn't for the Swedish fish, plate full of meatballs, the Forsed lamp that I've been searching for over a year, or the mass quantities of cheap crap that I never knew I needed so badly. No. Tonight I fell in love with the IKEA parking garage, moreover, the flatbed shopping carts in the IKEA parking garage.
A friend and I had a "date" to the dream store tonight, and after dilly-dallying through the textiles, kitchen supplies, frames, and the indoor plant section, we found ourselves in the far reaches of the parking lot with a flat bed cart. Taking it back to cart return, I gave it a good running start and then leaped on top of it. What a smooth ride. Quoting from Titanic I yelled out, "I'm the king of the world..." for all to hear and witness me in my 30-year-old glory riding my chariot home.
My friend wanted to give it a try, so I told her to take it for a spin. She agreed that it was definitely a five ticket ride. Then she had the scathingly brilliant idea that we should have cart races. We established the rules (i.e., how many steps we get for the running start--3) and away we went. One of the carts had a mind of its own. It became the stunt cart and would spin 360s down the parking aisle. I came close to bouncing off a Previa, but didn't even care because a.) danger is my middle name, ha!, and b.) it was too fun to stop!
Note to self: I need to make more time to play!
As we left IKEA to go get ice cream--oh boy, oh boy!--my friend stated that right there was a reason she doesn't think she's grown up enough to have kids. Case in point, we are both well-educated professionals who know better than to horse play in the parking lot on shopping carts (I hear parental voices nagging in my head). But it had us both giggling and giddy the remainder of the night. I think that spontaneous and creative flash of fun needs to have its place in parenting. Either that, or you leave the kids in the IKEA ball room of fun, while you go and ride the carts.
1 comment:
HI! I'm so, so, so, so thrilled that you finally have a blog. I skimmed it, but I'm starting at the beginning now and reading everything so I don't miss a single thing. It makes me feel so much more connected to you, and that's important to me.
Okay. The comment for this post: the great thing about having kids is that you ALWAYS have someone to play those silly games with! (Emma wishes I would do stuff like that more often!) It did not surprise me one iota that you would horse around in the parking lot on shopping carts, complete with rules for the game. It's just so you. And by the way, I happened to be at IKEA just two days ago, and we looked everywhere for Swedish Fish. We found none. What DID we find? We found "Jelly Rats." What kind of sick joke is that? Gross. Needless to say, we did not purchase them.
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