Monday, December 5, 2011

Sunday Update

Iris ripped a super loud fart during the pastor's pretty long prayer in church yesterday.  She was sitting on my lap and everyone had their eyes closed around me.  There is just no way any of those people are going to believe that man-sized blast came out of that little girl.

Friday, December 2, 2011

Torsdag is the new Tisdag

Hi all, a new post after a long hiatus!  I'm with the kids on Thursdays instead of Tuesdays now.

For today's activity, I tried the unthinkable...solo dad trip to IKEA.  Agreed, an unassisted trip to IKEA with three children under 5 does sound like a forgotten episode of Fear Factor or a triple-dog-dare challenge accepted, but we needed some new BESTA cabinets to envelop our big new normal-American-sized flat screen TV.  Yes, in a burst of post-thanksgiving consumerism, we finally upgraded from the boxy 13-inch (the little guy actually generated quite a bit of interest when I posted it for free on Craigs).  With my new, normal-American-sized TV, I have to sacrifice feeling morally superior to the rest of you, but I gain the ability to read the football game score from the couch.
Välkommen, Earthling consumers
Spirits were high as we aimed the car at the burbs, zooming in the opposite direction as rush-hour traffic.  Soon we arrived at IKEA, and the kids loved it.  Everywhere are little display roomlets with cabinets to look in and beds to jump on.  It's like all the things that would be unacceptable in a regular person's home are perfectly fine at IKEA.  The kids dragged out the wrapped Christmas presents from under the tree in the corner of one "living room".  Janie pitched a fit when I told her to stop reading the Swedish staging prop books she found on a bedroom bookshelf so we could get to the toy department already.   The three of them systematically laid in and bounced on every bed in the entire kids department and played with every toy.  The nice thing was that there was really no one around.  At 10am on a Thursday morning the store was pretty empty, the employees were nice, and we didn't seem to be annoying anyone.
Kids pretended to have a birthday party, singing Happy Birthday to Iris.  Um,  hello?  Isn't that someone else's birthday, too?


Sam in rolling bedroom coffin

That nice lady seems thrilled by whatever Janey is trying to tell her
We did have to take a detour from the kids department for long enough to write down the code for the BESTA bookshelf we came for in the first place.  I'm always interested in the names of IKEA products.  They often seem like fake Swedish cognates for english nouns, like a shelf will be named SHAALF or something. We encountered one actual product, a protective rubber floor mat for your home office named KOLON.  This evocative name conjured up a set of mental images of digestive trouble so horrifying it necessitates plastic floor protection.  A little unsettled, I shooed the kids on to the cafeteria.

The cafeteria, too, was nice, cheap, and set up to be easy for kids. Without really thinking, I ordered the kids french toast sticks and chocolate milk, loading them up with enough sugar to last the month.  We ate at these little kid tables surrounded by warpy circus mirrors and a tv playing cartoons.  I was waiting for one of their little heads to explode into a cloud of cotton candy, but it never happened.  We peed in the spacious family restroom and headed to the dreaded "self-service" catacombs to gather our bookshelf.

insert evil clown music and ticking time bomb sound here
The final stage of the IKEA experience is the maze-like self-serve section where the products displayed in the rooms are stored in elusive locations with puzzling names like "Aisle Eleventy-six, bin Foursteen".  If you're not careful, you can lose your sense of direction and never be heard from again.  Amplifying the off-kilter feeling are the carts provided for retrieval of your goods.  Unlike normal shopping carts, these ride on wheels that swivel to travel in any direction.  Pushing one feels like pushing a regular shopping cart across the oiled deck of a Swedish whaling vessel in high winds.  Of course, once we did find and load our shelves, Sam insisted on  pushing the cart by himself with no help ("take your hands off, DAD!").  We nearly leveled several displays on our way to checkout, where a friendly midwestern woman awaited as our cashier.  Adding to the ghastly surreality of the house-of-horrors self-serve experience was the sight of her left forearm, entirely covered in a photo-realistic tattoo of torn flesh peeled back to reveal muscle, gristle, and bone (no pic, sorry).  We fishtailed that crazy rudderless cart to our car, in a hurry to get back to the real world.

On the way home, the kids fell asleep to the sounds of their favorite car-song, the Black Eyed Peas' "Imma Be".  I actually remembered to mute 3 of the 4 (not bad, Dad) instances of the word "shit" in the song, which the kids are convinced is entitled "Elmo B."   The kids slept for about an hour in the car, which was long enough for me to make a phone call and do a little reading.  The rest of the day was fun, if uneventful, except for the reading of the ABC book by Dr. Suess, which contains this disturbingly unsafe-for-children image, ostensibly related to the Letter R:
Um, wow, that's quite a "horn"on that rhino, Dr. Suess.
Also, at lunch time, for the first time in my life, I somehow managed to burn a pot of hard boiled eggs.  Trust me, at one point that pot was full of water.

Fun Rating: 8.5 out of 10 Kids really had a lot of fun, and it was pretty stress-free because the store was so empty.  I'm a little embarrassed about my chocolate-cakeish breakfast selections for the kids, and it did get pretty trippy there at the end.  Isn't that always the IKEA experience, though?