I Made It!

My mother-in-law and I left Jack and Grandpa playing happily and drove up to the new Ikea store south of Salt Lake City today. We had a very pleasant time browsing the store and lunching on Swedish meatballs and red potatoes in the cafeteria.

I made it out of the store for under $100. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Duvet covers for Roger and me. One of our secrets to a peaceful marriage, inspired by our good friends Scott and Carolyn, is that we each have our own twin size duvets so we never fight over blankets. Several years ago my friend Wendy and I spent a night at the Four Seasons hotel in Boston (a birthday present from her husband) and at night they made up the beds with all white cotton linens, including duvets with white covers. So that's what we've had at home since then. I was so pleased to find solid white covers with some visual interest. You can't see the pattern on the photo at the Ikea website, but every inch or so they've tucked the fabric with a straight seam across the width of it. So it has lines, but it's still solid white.
• A cool red cardboard box to store Jack's papers and projects from school (click here for an account of recent related trauma). I actually found a box that is slightly longer than the link to the Ikea website shows (21 3/4" instead of 17 3/4") so it can accommodate more odd sized projects.
• An alarm clock for Roger, who is seriously alarm clock impaired. Really, he has at least three different alarm clocks, all of which are unreliable. The cool thing about this alarm clock is that we can record personalized messages for him to wake up to.