Ikea and Pretty Sure. And, by the way....

I'll lead with by the way.
Here we go again.
Yep, Kate's pregnant.
We'd been talking about getting Sam a sibling for a while. While I was in full support of the idea I was unwilling to go through the whole scientific approach again.
No more ovulation stick.
I agreed to pull the goalie and see if we score. It took eight months, but we scored.
Kate is between eight and nine weeks along. It's much worse this time, she's been way more sick than she was with Sam.
I think it's a girl.
That shouldn't be construed as I want a girl, I don't care. I just think it's a girl.
Kate wants another boy.
We haven't decided if we're going to learn the sex, by the way. If we decide to I'll say something here, you needn't ask.
We did have an ultrasound, so we know that as of a couple of weeks ago everything was going well. We saw the heartbeat.
So once again, those wanting updates on her progress should come here. I'll be more on the ball about updates now that this is going on.

Sam is coming along nicely.
He's getting pretty tall (relatively speaking) and he's still monkey-boy strong. His fine motor, communication, and problem solving skills tested way higher then his age at his last check up. His gross motor was behind, because he wasn't walking at fifteen months. Now, at eighteen months he's walking all over the place. He also has several words:
Hep (help)
Up (up)
Hat (hat)
Hot (hot)
Dada (that's me)
Papa (also me)
Hi (hi)
Yucky (yucky)
Yummy (yummy)
those last two seem to be interchangeable, actually.
Oddly enough, he doesn't say mama or mommy or anything like that for Kate.
He can also sign milk, eat, more, all done, and thank you.
He starts day care at a day care facility next week.
I'm pretty sure it's the right decision.
Not entirely sure.
He needs to be around other kids, right now he doesn't know how to do that. I'm pretty sure that if we wait any longer on that it will not work out as well as it might.
Not entirely sure.
I hate losing our nanny. She loves him, and she's been really terrific with him, and he gets all this one on one attention. And I feel somewhat guilty about what amounts to laying her off.
That's not an accurate statement, actually, I feel completely shitty about it.
But it's not a tenable long term solution for Sam, and I'm pretty sure that it's not the best long term arrangement for her either. She needs a job with benefits, and we can't give her that.
Not entirely sure.
In any case, it feels shitty.
I'm arriving at the unavoidable conclusion that pretty good is going to be the best that I can hope for for quite some time (or ever).
That, at least, I'm entirely sure of.

So, in preparation for the new one coming we had to make a pilgrimage to the inner ring of hell.
For those of you who haven't been there, our nearest branch of the inner ring of hell is down I90 almost to O'Hare. Big ass blue building on the right, bright yellow letters.
IKEA.
I hate IKEA.
It's a horrible place.
We drive two hours, make our way through the Woodfield Mall grounds to the IKEA parking lot where, if we're lucky, we can find a spot less than twenty minutes walk to the front door.
Once inside we join the hordes riding the escalator up to the top and work our way down.
What follows is an odyssey that takes several hours wading through not-to-scale displays of ten to thirty styles of bed, then twenty different shelving units, then forty night stands, ect...
Some of these things have labels. Most don't.
All of the labels are in Swedish. Some have English notes on the back of the label.
Most don't.
Ultimately you might find something that you think might work, and, if you're lucky, it has the bin number on the label in English. Then you write down the bin number, and go down to the basement warehouse and start pulling the stuff that you want to buy.
First you have to find a cart or a flatbed.
I'm pretty certain that the IKEA people track the numbers of customers in the store in order to ensure that the cart or flatbed ratio to customer never exceeds one cart or flatbed to every five customers.
An alternate, and equally viable, theory is that most of the people who actually have carts or flatbeds aren't customers at all, they're undercover IKEA employees who push carts around at intervals carefully designed to give you hope that you actually might find one while wandering around the store. Of course, while you're wandering around the store you end up seeing more stuff to buy.

Anyhow...
Eventually you spend a couple of hundred bucks and drive home with a station wagon full of cleverly designed un-assembled Swedish furniture.
Then the fun really begins.
IKEA, in case you didn't know, is Swedish for we're way cleverer than you.
This is evident once you begin to unbox everything and try to put it together.
The instructions are entirely graphical. There's no words at all (at least no helpful ones).
Allegedly this is because IKEA is a global corporation that sells its products to people of so many different cultures and languages that they couldn't possibly print instructions in so many languages.
That's a load of crap. If that were true all the signs in the store would be only graphical, but they're not. They're in Swedish (unless the store is in Sweden, where I suspect the signs are in Sanskrit).
No, the directions are graphical just to fuck with the customer. If they printed them in Swedish, you could just get them translated and be done with it. There would probably be websites devoted to IKEA directions translated into various languages. As it is, nobody can translate them, you just have to work your way through them.
They do have a helpful cartoon guy making helpful cartoon gestures with occasional
punctuation. No words, just punctuation.
When I look at the cartoon guy I get Kevin Dillon's Bunny from the film Platoon in my head.
"He's laughing at you man; that's the way the Swede laughs."
"Yeah, he's all broken up about the out of stock night stand and the long line for the meatballs."
"You should do him, man. You should do the whole fucking store."
Bunny was a whack-job.
And by the way, no, I haven't tried the meatballs. I've heard they're good. I'm sure they're good.
I'm not driving to Chicago and then eating in a FUCKING FURNITURE STORE.
Just on general principle.
Anyhow, I've always managed to get the damn stuff assembled, thankfully it comes apart as easily as it goes together so that I can reverse the piece that I installed backwards (with the post holes ever so slightly off center the other way), or recover the 4 inch screw from the hole that was intended for the 3.8 inch screw or whatever.
I usually have a screw or two leftover, but so far nothing has fallen apart.
Yet.
I'll post something on Sam's first day of daycare Tuesday night or Wednesday.