Moving to a new house has meant a lot of IKEA furniture. Coming from Sweden and moreover from a town very close to the first IKEA store, I have grown up with IKEA furniture so using the hex key to assemble a bed or a set of drawers makes me feel like I am back in Sweden again. With a baby always wanting to participate, it has taken time to finalize everything, but finally I believe I can now say that we have come to the end of our IKEA assembling journey for now.
But where there is an end there is also a beginning. Our son has, thanks to IKEA I want to believe, taken a great interest in assembling things as well as dissembling them (much to my happiness – it gets a little tedious to only build towers for him to tear down all the time when we are playing). At the medical clinic yesterday for example, the doctor let our baby play with his otoscope, and our son impressed the nurse greatly when he was able to take the plastic cap from the otoscope and put it back on. Over and over and over again.
At home I often try to open the veranda door only to find that the extra security lock that I normally do not use has been locked. My baby loves to play with the door handle as well as the security lock, opening it, closing it, opening it, closing it. Today looking at him, 100 percent focused on opening and closing the lever, an image from my childhood visits to the IKEA store in Sweden came to me. I was always fascinated by the chair testing machine they had on display in the store, equipped with a counter that showed how many times the weight on the chair had been pushed down, simulating someone sitting down on the chair. Seeing our boy pulling the lever up and down, up and down, I could easily imagine him doing very good work being a product tester for IKEA. And by the looks of it, he would be very very happy about it.
Share this post