INSANITY: The act of doing the same thing over and over again, always expecting a different result...or something like that

Things are moving right along as normal at our house. Hours spent cleaning. nothing to show for it. I did go through Ryan's closet a few days ago and totally pulled a Mommie Dearest, putting every toy, doll and dress up article into large trash bags, declaring her null and void on the toy front.

Of course I wasn't going to throw away all that stuff, but something had to happen -- things were getting broken, going missing...So yesterday I took the kiddos to IKEA, got a ton of organizational stuff, and went to work. The hanging toy-net thingy fell off it's hook under the massive weight of all her barbies, so some of those had to go. The make-shift drawers I bought (corrugated plastic and balsa-wood) will not fit all her dress-up gear, so something will have to go from that pile as well.

Is it just me, or is IKEA really just an exercise in insanity? First, their shopping carts are on some seriously screwed up casters, which makes pushing them through the store an exercise in itself. Then, everything is priced so well, you just end up throwing 30 $2.99 items into your basket until you to come to the end and realize you've racked up $100 worth of crap, finding yourself stashing unwanted things here and there as inconspicuously as possible, because if you really had to walk all the way back to replace every item you didn't want, you'd never leave the damn place. They really should have a " Point of No Return/Last Look" area like we used to at Mommy and Me, where you had one more chance to peruse all your items before checking out, and the ones you didn't want could just be stored on a nice little table for slaves to put back on the shelves for you. That way, at least they wouldn't end up going to pick up a large piece of furniture for a customer, only to find 3 hooks, a sheet set, and weird-ass looking kiddie chair where the furniture was supposed to be. I'm just sayin'...

Then you get your crap home, and here's where they get you -- it's a pain in the ass to put together their gflorified science-fair projects (remember tose balsa-wood contraptions that could hold like 250 lbs?). Mainly because the packaging is almost always missing a part, the pieces don't always fit quite right together, and who in the hell can understand those picture directions? Am I 5? Hmm...maybe I should get Ry to do it....

Anyway, I'm still in the midst of putting together the crap-ass drawer unit I was so happy to find, and even as I sit here cursing IKEA, I know that I'll be back within a month, searching for new things to buy, damning the wobbly baskets, mispronouncing the names of, uh, everything, and stashing unwanted items in the most unlikely places. Like I said, it's an exercise in INSANITY.