This I learned this week from a roadtrip with a friend and our two kids to Ikea:

* I love Ikea. If I could I would drive there and buy myself a new kitchen right this second… in addition to shelves and closet organizers for throughout my house.

* Ikea’s showroom is all child-proof! Obviously not in a “let your child loose and ignore them” kind of way, but there’s no breakable objects, and they can climb on the toddler bed and open the dresser drawers and play at the toddler-size kitchen. Kate found a child push-wagon that she was pushing around for a little while, pleased as punch.

* Being stuck in a vehicle for over half an hour with two screaming children is kind of funny, if you can look past the “my eardrums may shatter soon” part.

* Screaming kids feed off of each other. (One would finally calm down, the other would give a cry, and then they’d both be screaming again. Kate normally just chills out in the car so it was weird! But they were tired and I guess she didn’t like her friend crying.)

::

We’re having to baby-proof again. Or should I say, now we have to toddler-proof. My friend said that I should baby-proof everything at once, not scramble every month when she does something new… but what can I say, we do things piecemeal around here.

We can no longer use our end table since not only does she grab everything off of it (remotes, plates, cups of water…) but she’s started pushing it and flipping it over! She likes to stand on the underside and play with the legs. Talk about an unexpected problem to have… when I would try to picture what trouble we’d have with the side table I figured her hitting the corner and grabbing things were going to be the extent of it. Hahaha.

Also she has apparently grown another inch or two, as she can now reach the top of the table and desk. She can’t see, but she sticks her little hands up and grabs whatever her fingers touch, usually stacks of papers waiting to be filed. Agghhh. So I bought some shelves to put above my desk. As it is everything is piled on the desk and table to get it off the floor, and now that she can reach that too. As I told Den, we need to start using the vertical space in this house or we’re sunk.