It's the small things ....

It has been a very busy week. I spend many, many hours planning, organizing and writing emails for our co-op. Mostly I like it and it is such a great reward to hear moms say that they really enjoy it and it honestly helps them in their homeschool journey. That makes all work worth it. Though I don't know if my kids would agree with that, since there were a few days when they had to have peanut butter sandwiches because I was in the middle of something and couldn't stop without completely loosing my train of thought. Well, we are almost done and ready to start. I just need to finish writing the contracts for the teachers, send emails to the parents, ..... well and few other things   :)    BUT, we did take a day and just went to IKEA. I really like going to that store, always have. When my son was little - we lived in Berlin at the time - my sister, her son, my son and myself used to meet at IKEA, shortly after they opened that day. We would bring our little guys to the play area and go upstairs to the cafeteria and have coffee and talk for a very long time. Since it was early in the day we could leave the little tykes often for about 1.5 or 2 hours in Smaland. That was a nice, inexpensive break for us :)    Now my little guy isn't so little any more and even though he'd like to go, they won't take him at the play area anymore. Though we all still like to go to IKEA. We went last week and had a fun time. I found a "Wäscheständer"! I am so happy about that! Coming from Germany, it is quite normal to hang up your washed laundry on a clothes drying rack since dryers are not as common as they are here in the States. We are living in an apartment where we have to pay for the wash machine and dryer, which makes doing laundry expensive. In order to cut some cost I tried to hang up my laundry to dry on the regular clothes drying racks. However, they are pretty small and a little wobbly and just don't last very well. So I often put the laundry in the dryer because I couldn't hang it up anywhere. Then we went to IKEA. There I found IT!  A beautiful, fairly sturdy Wäscheständer!  Yes, in Germany many are much more durable, however, this one is pretty good. I can now hang up to three loads of laundry and let it dry in the sunshine on the balcony. It smells sooo good. I suddenly like doing laundry again. Sometimes it is the little things in life that make a difference :)