Speaking of IKEA--

Those B***ards!

A 20 minute drive to the store, because you know that there is never an IKEA down the street from you. And there is never an IKEA within 60 miles of another IKEA.

So you make a morning of it and take the trip because you absolutely need the 100 votive GLIMMA (I can't figure out how to type the umlaut) candles for $3, the HIVNMA three saucepan set for $7.99, and the geometrically-shaped white pleather SVARSKT chair for $19.99. Or maybe, like me, you just kind of like finding out how they say "unfinished wood toddler bed" in Swedish.

Which brings me back to my point: the SNIGLAR toddler bed. Which I wanted to buy because The Bambina has learned to climb into her crib which means it is only days till she makes the higher-life-form leap of logic that tells her she can also climb out. Not to mention, as you may have read earlier this week, that her "naps" now consist of her standing in her crib for an hour screaming, "Maaaaammmeeeee! DOWN!! DOWN!! DOWN!! Mammee Down!" So she needs to have a little more control over the particulars of the what we now call Quiet Time rather than Nap Time; ie, she doesn't have to sleep, but she has to be playing in her room quietly. Hence, my and my mother's annual pilgrimage to thar yonder IKEA, wherein we spent an hour looking at all the beds, picking the SNIGLAR, picking out a taller set of drawers since she can now reach everything on her little kiddie one, getting all the other vital life essentials (e.g., the SKOGSBAR plant pot for 99 cents), and heading down to the warehouse area to pick up the pieces of the furniture in the different self-serve aisles.

Which would have been great if all the bed components were available. As it turned out, upon the investigation of a quite nice IKEA representative, all of their toddler beds use the same mattress base component that is currently sold out and not available for 3 weeks. So I asked her, "So are you telling me that there is not one single toddler bed in this entire small city of a store that can be bought today and taken home? Not one? There were, like, TWELVE different models on the showroom floor! Not ONE of them is available for purchase today?" Nope. Not one. Not even the floor models. So I asked if perhaps they wanted to post a sign telling people--before they spent an hour mulling over all the different bed options--that they should come back in three weeks when they might actually be able to BUY one. She was nice, but gave me that impotent, "I only work here; what can I do?" look. She then said, "Our Woodbridge store has 22 left..." To which I replied more gently than I was feeling it, "You do realize that Woodbridge is an hour and a half drive from here, right?"

So we left. I had gone there for a bed, had picked up the other stuff as "gozontas" (the stuff that "goes on to" the bill when you are already making a purchase but that you didn't actually make the trip to buy), but all of a sudden didn't want to wait in line to buy, knowing that I'd be stuck with that model of drawers and table if I did happen to find a toddler bed somewhere else. So we left.

After, of course, buying the GLIMMA votives. After all, it would have been too depressing to make the trek home without having something to show for our troubles. I just thank god they didn't have any component parts...