At the end of this past summer, on a rainy Sunday, I packed up the kids and headed for IKEA in Conshohocken. I guess my guys can’t really grow up with a foreign-born mom without learning to appreciate two dollar minifängsts (I have two; they are great!).
It’s sad, yes, but whenever I receive the catalog, I read it like a magazine, with a cup of good coffee in hand. Sometimes I even tag the fifty-cent coffee mugs in the catalog that I’d like to add to my Swedish cupboard repertoire, or the five-dollar vase with the cumbersome first name. (“White vase” works for me, but then again, I don’t design these things.) While I sip my coffee and indulge in a smörgåsbord of perplexing products, I often plan my next trip to the store with the kids. It’s fun for all of us (or maybe they are simply still too young to question the store’s entertainment value).
So with the kids excited about heading inside the super warehouse of endless bargains and incomprehensible merchandise tags, we delved right into the children’s section during our last trip there. My son promptly tried out every single toddler bed, stool, and rocking-something (sure didn’t look like a horse to me). We also threw around snuggly plush broccoli florets and chocolate-covered strawberries (teddy bears are so I går). Genius. Who designs this stuff? Maybe the same people who write Phineas & Ferb episodes. Awesome.
After working our way through the ultra-sleek, perfectly geometric design spaces, I found myself with an armful of items I didn’t exactly need, but were too much fun to pass up. No one really travels for forty-five minutes for the sole purpose of purchasing a one-dollar garlic press. And no trip to the cheery yellow and blue mega-land is complete without stopping at the bistro. It’s the crowning achievement of our shopping adventure. You would think that the euro stops at the cafeteria counter, but IKEA’s food is also amazingly cheap (but good). In fact, kids’ meals were free the day we visited, so we enjoyed meatballs and pommes frites for next to nothing. I read that the color yellow can elicit headaches, but can it stimulate an appetite as well? Maybe their marketers are on to something here…
It’s not just the merchandise, of course, or the joy of watching my kids getting a complete kick out of the store that brings me back for three-hour visits at a time. It’s the memory of growing up overseas, I guess. As absurd as it sounds, this part of Conshohocken connects me to Europe, one meatball at a time.
We all carry around associations with certain places. While pommes, meatballs, and lingon berry jam on the side may seem a bit far-fetched for some, they work for me in every regard. And if I can pick up a new garlic press for pennies in the process, while my kids have a ball, that’s even better.
By Marion Kase
Marion Kase is a working mother who lives, plays, and, well, works out in the burbs. She captures a dirty sock laundry list of mundane, sometimes hair-pulling observations, as seen from the brim of my coffee cup, for all the unsung heroes in our wonderful community on her blog, Helicopter-Caterpillar.
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