Ikea!

A few weeks ago the weather was really really hot. We were dying in the heat and Joel had a project to work on for the weekend so Holly and I wanted to get out of the house. In desperation we drove over to Ikea.We heard it was not only air conditioned but a fun place for the kids to hang out. We arrived around 6ish and it must have still be 85 outside. We went upstairs and right away Holly found something to play with.There were slides, rocking horses, tent's a play kitchen and lots of tables and chairs for her to sit in and climb on. She was having a blast and ran around exploring everywhere.As we walked further into the store and around the maze of rooms we went into some of the demo apartments which had kids rooms and Holly climbed up on the toddler beds.We have been discussing getting her one, or at the very least putting her mattress on the floor for her to sleep in her own room. She really liked the little beds but I could tell she was still too little and could easily fall off in her sleep.I was so tempted to buy all the fun toys we were playing with. The cool tents were only 10$ and they also had crawling tubes, but I refrained from getting anything.I enjoyed watching Holly in the various rooms that were set up. it was neat to see how she responded to the various environments. One had a cool loft bed with a play area underneath. Holly did not like being up in the loft bed.She liked opening and closing all of the cabinets and drawers and looking at all of the shelves and sitting at the little toddler tables looking at the books.She was trying to reach into the bins holding the stuffed animals so instead I let her jump into the bin with them. She thought this was hilarious, at least after she finished her "whoa" response.Onto the next section there was a little tunnel with multi colored cycling lights that she could crawl through with neat little flaps that you would walk through. There were these little girls playing chase around and around the tunnel and Holly had to get in on the action.Here our little shopper is playing with the paper you use to write down item numbers. Anything the little rascal could get her hands onto.These are train tracks for a cool train set that Ikea has. its all wooden, but little old for Holly. We played int he various sections for a while, but she kept running further into the store, deeper into the vortex.After about an hour or so she got tired and needed a snack, then she decided she didn't want to run any more, and once she reached the far end of "the hell mouth" as Joel calls is, it was mommy's turn to carry her all the way through the maze and back to the other side.We took breaks to play, I love this little kitchen set, I want Joel to build something just like it. Our plan is to build an island for our kitchen, the top counter space for us, the bottom and side a play kitchen for Holly. This piece was like 150$ not inexpensive.It was really nice though, and each piece sold separately. At first I diluted myself into thinking it was 39.99$ then realized that was just the top section of the left side. I did like the little set of pots and pans too.By the time we got back to the main entrance mommy was exhausted and still had to go downstairs, unable to find a way out in the main entrance which is an escalated, I had to walk through the downstairs and then the warehouse.They were closing in a few minutes but I had time to get a frozen yogurt before we left on a cone too. Holly enjoyed sharing with me, and even though it was almost 9:00 and getting dark, the heat was still pretty unbearable when we rejoined the world.