Stepmom takes on IKEA

As a stepmom, one of the huge sacrifices I have to make is to respond to a stepkid’s occasional request to take  a day off to go shopping.  As a wife, one of the huge sacrifices I have to make is to respond to  Mark’s request to make a retirement nook where he can read, nap and–my favorite–drool.  Through an amazing alignment of the stars and planets, stepkid #2–a.k.a. Becky–lives a few miles from IKEA in Canton, Michigan, and her ability to take an afternoon off collided with Mark’s spring break and my ability to take a day off, and so we all went shopping at IKEA!

IKEA is huge and I felt quite lucky that Becky was there to help keep Mark moving along.  He’s the kind of shopper that reads tags and measures things and opens and shut doors, and if left alone, he’d be there for days.  I’m not much of a shopper, and after gazing at furniture for an hour, I was a bit bored and decided to help IKEA sell some of their stuffed animals by making them look sad and pitiful.

I also organized the rats so they’d be more sellable, too, though I’m not sure that worked well, either.

Beyond the stuffed toys we found more and more furniture, and suddenly we found a chair we liked and a foot rest that would look really cute by our window.  And around the corner there was a matching chair for our dog, Little Dipper that was dirt cheap, and gosh, Mark could use that small table for his book and reading glasses, and a lamp to see by, and gee, while we’re here, we should get four wooden chairs to replace the old cane chairs that were chewed on by dogs, and are all wobbly.   I’m not sure how it all happened, but it does at IKEA and we kept finding things and Becky kept writing down the items and the aisle and bin numbers we’d find the items we wanted.

With our wish list in hand, we pushed cart to the warehouse-part of the store where Becky and I hid amongst the bins for a moment, imagining how much fun it would be to play hide-and-seek or Sardines in IKEA. 

But there were things to buy, so we went to the aisles and bins that held all of the nifty things we’d seen on display.  Soon our cart looked like this. 

 

After rearranging our car and loading up our boxes, we stopped at Becky’s to say hi to her cat, Glen, who in his own cat-like way let us know that we could have brought home one of those stuffed rats for him.