I’m over at Coffee+Crumbs talking about my most recent trip to IKEA and marriage after 16 years and three kids. Please enjoy this pic of my new bookshelf to hold my 1980s troll dolls. I built it with my BARE HANDS and clearly will be petitioning for my own HGTV show.
Sometimes I look at my husband and think, “It was you and me when we started and it’ll be you and me when these yahoos leave.” This parenting thing is like a twenty-year team building exercise, like a high ropes course or American Ninja Warrior.
And the further in we get, the more well-oiled machiney we get. The other day we took the kids to IKEA for new bookshelves, because bookshelves make us feel like we’re getting our crap together. Every year we seem to buy more shelves until one day in the future our entire house will be a labyrinth of musty Nancy Drew mysteries and memoirs of my favorite comedians.
We loaded the kids into the minivan and headed out to the Big City to be productive and build things with our own hands. The kids watched a movie and we sat up front and drank coffee and talked, which is equivalent to an Extremely Hot Date when you’ve been married for sixteen years.
While I stood in line for Smaland (which I can only assume is Swedish for “we’ll entertain your kids for half an hour while you run around like crazy people but get your asses back here on time or we’re giving them away”) with our six and eight-year-old, he took the too-old-for-ball-pits eleven-year-old to start searching for the shelves we’d already scoped online. Once the littles entered Smaland, we were on the clock unless we wanted to schlep shelves while peeling children off the Ektorp (which I can only assume is Swedish for “this sofa is great for wiping boogers”), so I raced for a cart and filled it with the items on my list. And a bath mat which was an impulse buy. And three flower pots which were also impulse buys. And a vanilla candle, okay shut up stop being so judgy about the impulse buys. READ MORE
