There are different sizes of high chairs available, play towers, a nursing mother area and bottle warming stations. The cafeteria-style restaurant, which will open everyday a half hour before store opening and close a half hour before the store closes, has family-friendly touches as well. IKEA is open everyday except Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.One thing that's sure to keep kids occupied is to feed them, especially since, as Gravina pointed out, a typical Ikea customer spends between two and three hours at the store. IKEA Restaurant opens 1/2 hour before the store and closes 1 hour before the store. Smaland opens at 10:30am – but you can get in line at 10:15am to snag your kids’ spot, there’s often a line and it fills up fast. The paint on the wooden stuff will probably improve their nutrition.Īnd I’m not saying you should do this, but you could conceivably drop your potty trained munchkin off and then go sip coffee and read. Oh, and IKEA toys are NOT included in the recently publicized toy recall. If you can actually get out of there without buying a bunch of stuff, it is perfection. I am sure you already know this, but breakfast for everyone at IKEA is 99 cents, kids’ lunches and dinners are 99 cents, they have innumerable play areas throughout the store, baby food and bottle warmers and family restrooms and comfy chairs for nursing breaks and special parking spots for breeders. You can check it out yourself and watch two cute kids named Joey and Maria have the time of their lives in the store virtual tour here. When I returned to retrieve him he was blissfully happy and had drawn me a picture and had made some new friends he is still talking about this morning. My own kid told me not to let the door hit me on the way out and ran off to play. Got to love that they actually clean those balls.

The b ig ball pit was being cleaned and so was unavailable. It was not crowded and there is a limit on how many kids they will take at a time so that the vibe is not stressful for the children. Cars was on the TV, art supplies and wooden toys were aplenty, safe climbing areas abounded and kids aged 3-6 were there to play with. The two women I met yesterday in charge of supervising the kids were ridiculously nice and capable. Then you leave your little darling to have a blast for up to one hour while you shop or go play with any younger kids in the more babified areas throughout the store. You sign a bunch of forms, get matching hand stamps with your child and a bucket for their shoes and receive one of those electronic pagers like they give you at the Cheesecake Factory. Parents and their younger siblings are not. But yesterday I set out to get the 411 on that intriguing area at the IKEA entrance that my oldest has been clamoring to get into since 2004.Ĭhildre n that are fully potty-trained and 37″-54″ tall are welcome in Smaland. And I am a worrywart and we are codependent attached and the kids and I like doing all the fun stuff for families at IKEA together. The nature of my job is that they don’t get supervised by strangers very often. If you have pre -school aged children you probably already know the other name for IKEA’s Smaland : HEAVEN. If you have kids that are in or barely out of diapers, you may wonder what is the deal with that kid drop-off area at the entrance to the IKEA in College Park.

Smalland ikea