Bless Your Heart

9 (plus) hours in the car

8 total in years of the ages of the 2 girl children of my friend Candice (I think that was the most poorly worded sentence I’ve ever written)

7 arguments (including one mean slap fight) that the girls had

6 dollars spent on hot dogs and slushies after shopping at IKEA

5 dvds viewed during drive

4 stops during the drive

3 hours of sleep the night before the trip

2 emergency pairs of shoes bought during trip

1 champ of an infant

0 pictures taken of our trip

That list seemed like a good idea until I realized I was really reaching to use all the numbers. I should really blog when I’m more awake. So I got up at 6 am this morning after 3 crappy hours of sleep. Damn CSP wouldn’t come to bed and the pugs wouldn’t stop barking and I didn’t want to take an Ambien since I had to get up so early and I kept thinking I was going to oversleep. Ugh. I was on time leaving my house. I’ll give you a minute to get over the shock. I walked next door and met up with Maggie (age 3) in the minivan. She was playing with some toys.

Maggie, where are your shoes?

In the cubby.

Where’s the cubby?

Right there.  (she points to an area of the van with lots of pockets)

You promise your shoes are in there?

Yes Miss Shannon.

OK. Just then Candice came outside to deposit some stuff in the van. I noticed Ellie (age 5, in a month) standing in the doorway in just her undies. Dude, if I’m up at 6am, we are hitting the road. I’m tired. Candice got Ellie dressed and brought Charlie (age 10 mos) downstairs. I asked Ellie where were her shoes. Right there she said. OK. We hit the road.

Around 9 we stopped at one of those travel centers where the truckers can take showers. Everyone had to use the restroom and Charlie needed a new diaper. Candice opened the back doors and told the girls to put on their shoes.

We don’t have shoes.

WHAT???

We forgot our shoes.

OMG. So we had to load those children on our backs and schlep them into the bathroom while pushing Charlie in the stroller. I put paper towels down on the floor so they could stand on them. Candice just kept saying DON’T touch anything. OK, no problem we’ll just stop at W@lmart or something and pick up some shoes. Didn’t pass a single W@lmart or T@rget sign the entire rest of the way to Atlanta. We stopped at the outlets just outside of ATL and Candice ran into 4, count em, 4 different stores and could not find a single pair of shoes under $20 each. Then we saw R@ck Room so I ran in there while she did a diaper change on Charlie. I found 2 pair of Croc knock offs for $20 total and the girls were happy.

We finally got to IKEA and went right to the restroom. It was a fight to get Maggie out of the family restroom because there were toys in there. Then we went upstairs to lunch. Then back downstairs to drop the girls off at Smaland, the play area. The Smaland woman who checked us in was apparently in the running for the Guiness book of records for the longest fingernails ever. Good thing she works with kids. She checked the girls in and told us to come back in an hour. WHAT? An hour?? One?? I begged her for more time and pimped our story that we came from Charlotte. She relented, but we knew we were on borrowed time.

Upstairs we went and booked it through. Then at 2 we had to camp out in a bedroom so Candice could take part in a conference call. Are you kidding me??? Luckily Charlie likes me and is so good natured and didn’t mind just playing for 20 minutes. We started shopping some more and made it all the way to rugs/curtains before being paged to pick up the girls. I stayed with Charlie while Candice got the girls. Maggie and Ellie were ready to go home and made it no secret. They whined our way through the rest of the marketplace and the warehouse. We stood in line for about 3 days to pay while Maggie whined “I don’t wanna pay!”. Yeah, me either kid but they make you. I barely bought a thing, but Candice loaded up. By the end of it we had 2 buggies, the flat cart and the stroller.

Public Service Announcement: bring your own bags to IKEA now or be prepared to pay 5 cents a bag for plastic shopping bags. OR buy a ginormous blue IKEA bag for 59 cents and reuse it forever. We have a ton of the big IKEA bags and just love them.

Also, you have to bag your own stuff and apparently the Swedes aren’t familiar with the term HOTlanta and are stingy with the air conditioner, so by the time we were out of the checkout we were the sweatiest most run down and haggard looking housewives you’ve ever seen. I think we even smelled bad.

We bought hotdogs and slushies and snorked those down before heading out to the car. That’s when Maggie and Ellie both finally hit the wall and just melted down. Maggie screamed about not wanting a straw in her slushie and Ellie was all freaked out about how unfair it was that she had to push Charlie’s stroller. Candice cracked me up when she crouched down in front of Ellie and said “Life’s not fair, and I’m truly sorry about that. But you are gonna push that stroller and you’re not gonna cry about it.” Ellie clammed up and pushed the stroller.

The entire time we were shopping and Candice was adding items to her list I would remind her that we didn’t drive a semi truck. I skipped buying lamps for the family room for that reason. She apparently forgot we drove a minivan full of children. Until we tried to put her 4 bookcases and 1 giant craft desk that came in 3 boxes into the tiny space behind the seats. Yeah. Add that to her 2 blue IKEA bags and my 1 IKEA bag plus magazine rack and you’ve got 2 annoyed, tired, and helpless women trapped in a parking deck that was at least as hot as the 7th level of hell. I flagged down the nicest man in Atlanta who put the bookcases on top of the van like they were nothing and never broke a sweat. Problem was, nothing to tie them down with. The twine boxes were empty. NO!!! So we drove twineless around the parking deck until we found a box with twine. Hallelujah!!! (IKEA provides free twine in the loading zones)

Candice: Do you know how to do this?

Um, no. See I usually sit in the car while CSP ties down the stuff. Don’t you know how?

No. I usually sit in the car while Devin ties the stuff down.

Great. We did our best (Candice retied a few of my knots. Hey, I’m no sailor.) and we hit the road. That’s when we realized it was 5:18pm. In Atlanta. Nothing like sitting in stop and go rush our while stressing out the whole time that with the next tap of the brakes 4 enormous boxes filled with bookcase parts would fly off the minivan roof and kill an innocent family. We stopped 30 minutes and one backtrack into our trip to re-secure the knots. Why oh why are there 2 interstates named 85 AND 75 marked with tiny signs placed miles into the air? We were 10 minutes on our way to Chattanooga until we realized we were on the wrong road.

The girls fought sleep on the way home and the fighting began. At one point they were literally trying to out sob each other. We stopped for a bathroom/snack break at McDon@ld’s where Charlie had a diaper blowout and Candice was out of wipes. FUN. The girls finally fell asleep 30 minutes from home.  Charlie was a champ.  I swear that’s the most laid back, easy going baby I’ve ever met.  He was still giggling and in a good mood on the way home after a loooong day and no nap.  We pulled into Candice’s driveway at just before 11 pm.

CSP came out and helped us unload. When we got into the house I told him all about our trip and how much Candice loved IKEA. I just feel bad for her because she didn’t get the true IKEA experience. We’re definitely going back one day sans offspring. It’s just not the same when you can’t wander through touching and oohing over everything at a leisurely pace. We did have fun though. And I can’t wait to get back to IKEA. Once you get the itch, it’s hard to scratch!