I have a confession to make: when we got home from Ikea on Sunday, we put Abe to bed and then watched most of the last half of the Super Bowl.

And boy was that ever a bummer. Lesson learned: don’t watch football; stay at Ikea longer.

This was our fifth annual Superkea Sunday, and it was the least crowded one ever, owing to the Falcons’ second ever Super Bowl appearance. I remember the first time. We lived in Boston, and I believe we actually attempted to throw a Super Bowl party for some reason. I don’t remember anything about the actual party, so I’m guessing that either it wasn’t a very exciting party or I drank too much. Or, you know, both.

Superkea Sunday is a holiday on par with….well, maybe not Christmas, but at least the Fourth of July around here. We start out with an early dinner out, and then we move on to our leisurely tour of Ikea, with plenty of time to pretend to live in all the little fake apartments and to play with the toys in the kids’ section, and we finish up with a bag of Swedish Fish.

And then I come back here the blog, and I tell you about some stuff we bought and some things we saw at Ikea, and then Superkea Sunday is all over for another long, long year :(.

You can read about past Superkea Sundays here, here, here, and here.

Every year I make the kids pose for a photo together by the entrance (where we can park SO CLOSE on Superkea Sunday!)

And then on the most….interesting sofa we can find (this year the sofa wasn’t as loud as in year’s past. Apparently there’s less demand for really ugly sofas than there used to be):

Incidentally, I left the real camera at home this year, so these are all from my iphone. Because 1. I’ve gotten a new iphone since last Superkea Sunday with a better camera and 2. I always feel a little silly hauling a camera around Ikea and 3. the pictures aren’t going to be that great no matter what, with the fluorescent lights everywhere.

We didn’t have a whole lot on our shopping list this year. We got a few pots for more plants for the great indoor gardening experiment (which, by the way, is going….slowly), some curtains for our bedroom, and some things for our new toy hauler. Oh, and cat pillows for the basement movie room:

The movie room will probably be getting its own update post soon. The older kids’ big Christmas present this year was a new, better projector….which led to us making a new, bigger projector screen, and has also led to us spending a lot more time down here (the old projector was a pain to use in a lot of ways, so we tended to decide it wasn’t worth the trouble a lot of the time). Anyway, so it needed new pillows of course.

We saw our Friheten sofa while we were at Ikea, too, and Milo tested it out to see if it was as good as ours at home:

We’re in the research phase of finding some storage pieces for the new trailer, and I really liked the look of these little cabinets for the kids’ clothes:

And I loved this mismatched chairs look they had going on in one of the fake kitchens. We have mismatched chairs in our kitchen, but all painted the same color. The paint’s started to peel pretty badly, and I was getting a little tired of them anyway….so now I’m thinking different wooden chairs (or maybe with some black mixed in) might work in there like it does here:

Abe had some birthday money to spend, so he picked out this big bag wolf with granny from Little Red Riding Hood (you can put poor granny through the wolf’s mouth and then open up his stomach to get her back out) and three little pigs:

Ah–here it is–a shot with NO PEOPLE in it….we love you, Superkea Sunday!

Ikea is totally on board the cactus train:

Guess what you can do at Ikea on Super Bowl Sunday?! Watch the Super Bowl!

Seasonally appropriate:

I’ve commented before that, even on Superkea Sunday, Ikea manages to stay just understaffed enough that you have to wait in a really long line at the end….but not this year! There was just one person ahead of us, and we were out of there in no time. There was barely time to grab a bag of Swedish Fish:

And then, just like that, Superkea Sunday was over. See you next year, Ikea! (also probably before that, too)