And on the Eighth Day God Created Ikea....

Okay, so this suggestion may border on sacrilegious. But have you seen this place?!?! With birthday week rapidly approaching, Dave and I find ourselves immersed in our annual rush to finish birthday shopping in spite of our sincerest intentions to do so a minimum of a month in advance. (And I wonder why I don't meet my deadlines. Has ANY parent EVER finished ANYTHING early? If you are reading this thinking "I do all of the time", please stop reading now. I cannot relate to you.) So this year, our rush toward completion involves one final gift: Ellie's big girl bed. Yes, our bug is moving up in the world and within the week will call a full sized bed her own. For the record, our initial intention was to use an antique brass bed that once belonged to one of Ellie's namesakes. Upon extricating said bed out of storage, however, we were met with rusted metal, bent rails, and exposed screws. Not exactly ideal for the preschool set. (Sorry Grammy!) This left us with plan B - go out and find a new bed to purchase for our girl with less than two weeks to go before her birthday. Good times.
Our first stop on our great, if slightly frantic, quest was a local furniture institution which shall remain nameless but has until very recently maintained a stranglehold on the home furnishings market in our area. (We discovered that a Furniture Row - FURNITURE ROW!!! - is under construction next door to Ikea, but its opening date has yet to be determined. Sigh. That remains a dream for another day. And for those of you who haven't lived along the front range, patience. Soon you too will understand.) We attempted to stifle our potentially uproarious laughter as we looked at price tag after price tag for beds priced upwards of $700. The Hannah Montana and Disney Princess decor surrounding said beds did nothing to temper the sticker shock involved, or justify the prices themselves. (Although the decorations did elicit repeated requests - one might say desperate pleadings - for a "princess bed" that bordered on obsessive and which were, I am certain, their primary objective.) Needless to say, we promptly abandoned the hallowed halls of traditional furniture monopoly and found ourselves needing to regroup.
Since no shift in strategy can possibly take place with starving children who threaten to shrivel up if they are not fed, we spontaneously (?) selected a tried-and-true restaurant as our home base for future operations. As luck would have it, said tried-and-true restaurant was no more than a few miles from a place we have meant to visit since it opened to much hoopla and even more meatballs a few months ago - IKEA. So, in the immortal words of our countless forefathers who have lived in the shadows of the everlasting hills, we decided "what the heck?!?!"
Heavenly choirs of angels proffered their idyllic strains as we crossed the threshold.... Okay, so it wasn't quite that dramatic, but this place truly is transcendent. Even the girls were utterly enthralled by the sundry vignettes, brights colors, and seemingly never ending selections of, well, everything one could imagine. Dave and I even got a workout in the bargain as we were forced to chase our girls everywhere. (The chasing of the girls was followed by the enforced carrying of the would-be runaways for the remainder of our visit.) While we were unable to tarry quite as long as we would have liked (has anyone actually been able to carry a nearly four-year-old around Ikea, or anywhere for that matter, for longer than thirty minutes?), it was enough time to stumble upon nirvana. The elusive find. The un-gettable get. We found THE bed. And the "most beautiful fancy mirror Ellie has ever seen!" So as the upcoming birthday dawns, Dave and I will be prepared with the promised nocturnal trappings, and all will be right with the world. After all, the world is inhabited by Ikea.