Our day at Ikea was sooooo much fun! I honestly have to say that the best part might have been just holding hands. We so rarely get to just walk and hold hands anymore, as our hands are often filled with other little glorious hands, which is delightful! But I do miss holding hands with my husband, so this was a treat 🙂
We got to the store as it opened, and made our way to the kitchen department. Keep your snide commends about Ikea kitchens to yourself, if you can help it. They are fabulous products that are often assembled and installed incredibly poorly, making them seem cheap and flimsy. They aren’t. We are SO excited to be putting an Ikea kitchen into our brand new house 😀 So we went to their kitchen department, checked in, sat down at a computer, and someone came and looked at the rough design we had started at home a few nights before. She gave us a few tips, and told us what we needed to perfect before she would finalize our list. If you’ve ever used that planning program, its pretty painful. Slow, old technology that isn’t the kind thats sticking around because its SO good, but rather just because no one has upgraded it. Its almost impossible to get anything perfect. However, the employee helping us knew a few good tips and got us on the right track after a while. But it was Saturday, and the computers filled up FAST. Everyone working that area of the store had lots of people to help. It was ok, though. We could NEVER have done it with all three kids, no matter how well behaved they were. But we knew that. It was Saturday, and it would be busy. But it was just us, so we knew it would be lower pressure. Who cared how long it took? Thats how we felt until it was clear that the woman helping us no longer was helping us. We hadn’t seen her circulate by us for a solid half hour, and finally reached out and asked someone else when she’d be around again. Apparently she was five minutes away from taking a half hour lunch break.
It was right around that point that we were mildly annoyed and impatient. We considered going to shop and coming back in a bit to try again, but we decided to just wait it out and not risk putting ourselves further towards the back of the line. We weren’t priority anyway, since we were not planning on ordering the kitchen that very day, but just needed the list all lined up for when the time comes.
When it was finally our turn, a very anxious-seeming man came to help us. He was going at warp speed and clicking all kinds of things wrong and deleting stuff of of our plan, just going like mad. Brady and I were nervous, watching each other while this guy just went snake on all of our hard work. Then he’d take his paperwork and go to another table a ways away and do a bunch of work, and be gone for quite a while. His communication skills weren’t awesome, we’ll say. But when he did come back to us, he was THOROUGH. He went through our kitchen drawing and showed us, piece by piece, what the list was made up of. It was incredibly comforting to see it so specifically. Every single panel, filler piece, door handles, feet, toe kick, etc. It was ALL there. He went pretty quick, but he would watch our expressions, and go through a second time the parts that we seemed uncertain of. He was really really good at his job!
So a LONG 3.5 hours later, we left the kitchen department with a folder full of information for our eventual kitchen order. It was a really long process, but it feels great to have it done! And to have done it ourselves!! Somehow it feels more rewarding this way. We were originally planning to take a nice long meander through Ikea afterwards, but we’re trying to practice restraint and not buy a bunch of stuff for a house that doesn’t exist yet. So we walked through and retrieved the handful of items on our list only. We grabbed some kids dishes for a friend, and then a few things for us that are for the house we are building, because we had to do some!! And we planned for that in advance. We bought our living room rug that I have been eyeing up for a couple of years already, and we bought our en suite sink!! Eek! It felt so good to walk out of there with things we are truly excited to put into our next home!
We wrapped up the day with a date. We drove to West Edmonton Mall and went for dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory. We had the mozza sticks for a starter, which were not actually sticks, but triangles, clearly making them far fancier. Then Brady got his classic spaghetti and meat sauce while I got their fettuccini con pollo. Apparently they are the only location that serves that dish, and if you are ever there, I highly recommend it!!! The white sauce is NOT alfredo like I expected. It was exquisite. Unlike any pasta sauce I’ve ever tasted. Ridiculous. Anyway, we both ate our body weight there, and our plans to get ice cream elsewhere were thrown out the window. We headed home instead. We were going to lose an hour on our way back, and we were driving away from the sun, so it was going to get dark fast, and we were SO tired!!!
The drive home was lovely too. I’ll admit, I slept for about a half hour, but I needed to. I knew I couldn’t make it the whole way with the 3-ish hours of sleep I had the night before. After that, though, I was good. We bought a new album on iTunes, and rocked out to that. Around Lloydminster, we grabbed donuts and coffee from Tims, and I managed to stay awake until we arrived at my parents 2.5 hours later. We had a quick chat with them before we all hauled off to bed. Praise the Lord, yet again, for Rowan agreeing to sleep all through the night, even away from home! I slept considerably more last night, but in all honesty, Brady and I are both still wiped right out. But I can confidently say we would do it all over again. HUGE win! Best date we’ve had in a long long time. I hope to road trip with you again soon, my love.