Trip to Edmonton

Oh, what a busy 24 hours! Lots of fun things to recount today!
To begin, Matt, Gabe and I did a trip to Edmonton yesterday to return the dog we had been sitting. While initially we had thought about just dropping the dog off and turning around to head home that night, we were offered a room at Matt's sister's house and a promise of entertainment the next day and decided to take them up on it. So we hit Edmonton around 4 and after a bit of running around, key picking up and dog dropping off we drove to IKEA by about 6. Matt's sister and her husband were getting home from a vacation that night and we said we'd pick them up at the airport at 8 so we only had 2 hours to spend at IKEA, however, I had made a list in advance of things that I really needed so I thought it would be a pretty quick trip. Well, it wasn't. It was very productive however. IKEA is awesome for pointing out things that you never knew you needed :) For example, I didn't know that I needed that 17 piece set of food storage containers until I saw it there for $4.99. I also didn't know that Gabe needed a bug shaped lamp that hangs on his wall but apparently he did. We did however know that we needed new dishes - that's been quite apparent to us for a while given the obvious nearing of the life expectancy of our current dishes which have taken to breaking for the oddest reasons. So we bought a new 6 place setting set of dishes for $29.99. I also did know that we ought to have a duvet cover for our gorgeous white duvet so when we saw a cute one for $13.99 we decided that was a good idea. We found lamps for our bedroom which mean that I can actually see what I'm reading at night, some new bibs and utensils for Gabe, a new cloth food set for him and a new dresser that we're going to convert into a change table for the nursery. All in all, it was very productive.
As I alluded to above, however, it was also very long. With stopping to feed Gabe supper half way through the shopping trip we were about half an hour late for picking up Matt's sister. Fortunately they were a bit delayed with some luggage issues so it all worked out... until we had to all try and fit into our van with their luggage and our IKEA purchases. But we managed.
This morning we all slept in, except for Gabe, we had a quick breakfast, packed our van back up and went to West Ed for the afternoon. Matt's sister and her husband took Gabe to the water park as a bit of a treat for us and so Matt and I got to go shopping with Matt's other sister. That was awesome. I found a whole new side to shopping at West Ed that I had never discovered before: T&T Supermarket. It's the asian grocery store down the Chinatown wing and they had stuff that I had never even heard of before. They had a super extensive produce section (we only walked through the fruit, not even all the veggies) where we found things like rambutan, kumquats and lychee nuts, but we also found this thing called a rose apple which looked like a normal apple that shrivelled from the top down. We then walked over to the live seafood section where they had not only lobsters, crabs and tilapia but conches and geoducks! I'd never seen a geoduck (pronounced goo-ey-duck) in real life! And I had never even seen a conch with anything in it! It was awesome - and might I say, so was my restraint. Being pregnant helped with the restraint I think. It was the only time in my life I wanted to live in Edmonton, just to have access to all the awesome culinary potential. Having said that, our monthly food budget would at least triple.
Besides T&T we also had some great bubble tea from the Dream Tea hut and we found a maternity swimsuit for me! Which is something I was beginning to despair of. After Gabe had finished swimming with Auntie and Uncle we had lunch at the Spaghetti Factory and then headed home. Nice hey? So tonight already we've started washing our new dishes, installed our new lamps and set up one of my organizational tools I picked up.
What a nice 24 hours!

Mrs. Vander Leek ;)