My kid is ridiculous cute... part two.

I love Ikea.
Ikea is one of my favorite furniture stores.
Ikea is one of my favorite kitchen hardware stores.
Ikea is one of my favorite decorating stores.
Ikea is one of my favorite stores.

This past weekend one of my favorite stores had a very good sale on champagne glasses. The glasses aren't very nice, just very cheap. How cheap, you ask? I'll tell you. The glasses are so cheap, you could have that romantic drink by the fireplace and toss away a pair of glasses every night for a month and it would only cost you seven bucks. In February. Yep, that's right, at twenty-five cents a piece, I had to get to Ikea immediately.

In order for me to satisfy my shopping urge, I needed to take my lovely daughter with me. Shopping with her is not simple. IF you can get the kid into the shopping cart (or "buggy" as they say in the Deep South), you normally are on a rigid time limit before meltdown occurs. In order to keep Her Highness satisfied, happy, appeased, occupied, one would need three arms. That is, IF you can get her into the cart.

One of the things that I have been doing in order to get myself into better shape is taking my sweet kid for hikes around the local mountain side. The trick to getting an 18 month old kid to hike is to never let her feet touch the ground. That's right, you heard it. Don't let the kid do any walking on her own. It's not that she wouldn't enjoy walking the trail; trust me, she would. She would probably enjoy it too much. So much we would spend too much time pointing at and naming every leaf on the ground, every tree, every bird. Let me assure you that each animal/vegetable/mineral that she names makes me one proud papa, but we are doing this for me as much as her. To keep the hike at a reasonable pace I have decided to use a "backpack carrier" that my friend, Fig, gave me after his kid grew out of it. Her Highness loves the backpack carrier. She calls it the "pack".

Ok, thanks for sticking with me here...
That digression explains how I was able to deftly maneuver the winding aisleways of Ikea, with two free hands to push a cart load of cheap-o champagne glasses as well as several other well-priced goodies. My very cute kid sat in the backpack carrier during the entire trip through the store, not just the first hour, but also when we sat through the long checkout lines, and then even longer while we went back into the store for some post-shopping snacks. Not only did she last the 85 minutes or so, she was happy.

You just can't beat that with a stick. My kid is ridiculous cute.