Comments(1)June 24, 2008
Comfort thy name is Sleep Country
When Ben and I were married he brought to the relationship a crap ass double bed. I too brought to the relationship a crap ass double bed. Over the first year we tried a multitude of different combinations. First, we tried his double bed, then we tried my double bed. Then we tried one box spring and both our mattresses. Finally we settled on tossing the bed frame and placing both box springs and both mattresses on the floor.
I don’t know if you guys have noticed but I’m not exactly a small girl; I definitely take up more than my fair share of the bed. As if that wasn’t bad enough for poor Ben, he also had to deal with the cat. From the time I brought Smokey home, over 14 years ago now, I slept on one side of the bed and he slept beside my head on the other side. When I married Ben, Smokey would not be deterred from sleeping beside my head. After a few months the three of us came to an unspoken agreement. Smokey slept in his usual spot beside my head (tucked comfortably into the crook of my arm), I slept in the middle of the bed and Ben? Poor Ben had about four inches left over in which to twist his body into a comfortable position. (In my defense, I honestly tried to get Smokey to sleep in a different spot, down by my feet perhaps, but he is one stubborn cat. If I didn’t make space for him to sleep beside my head, he simply flopped down on my head, cutting off my air supply and making me hack up a fur ball every morning.) And while I did feel slightly sorry for him (I’m not a complete monster) I had to make the point that Smokey had been sleeping longer with me than Ben had and therefore had squatter rights. Unable to make an valid argument against my logic, Ben resigned himself to sleeping on the edge of the bed and in the past four years has only fell off the bed twice. Myself, I think that’s pretty impressive. Ben? Not so much.
Yesterday, after four years of various springs poking into various body parts (dirty!), crawling out of bed each morning with stiff and sore backs, multiple complaints of “You’re too hot, move over!” and “There’s a cat hair stuck in my eyeball!” and two separate falling out of bed and doing a face plant in the carpet incidents, we tossed our old double beds and cheered when the good people at Sleep Country Canada delivered our new KING size bed. Yup, we went from a Double to a King. And it is glorious. Now I understand why all those people asked how we could possibly still be married after sleeping in a double bed.
The bed takes up the entire bedroom, we have nothing else in the room but the bed and have I mentioned the gloriousness of it? We splurged and bought a mattress with a combination of linen and memory foam and sinking into that bed is a little like what I would imagine sinking into a soft fluffy cloud is like. The bed is so high that I have to climb to get into it and I’m seriously considering investing in a step stool to make it easier to get into bed at night. We also bought a goose down duvet and 320 thread count Egyptian sheets and two brand new pillows. After one night of sleeping in it I can honestly say it’s the best investment we’ve ever made.
When we were shopping for the bed, I wanted to go with a Queen size but Ben, wise man that he is, convinced me that a King was the way to go. “You know dear,” he said “before I married you, I slept on my stomach and it was quite comfortable. Now I have to sleep on my side and my arms keep falling asleep.” To which I lovingly responded, “So what? I used to sleep on my stomach before we got married too buster. Now we both sleep on our sides, it’s called sacrifice.” Despite my hesitation, he eventually convinced me on the King by pointing out that a Queen was only six inches larger than a double and while it might make a difference for the first month, it wouldn’t be long before it felt crowded again.
My only problem is that after sleeping in a double for so long I got used to having Ben right beside me. Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and turned over to spoon him. I couldn’t find him. I kept reaching further and further and encountering nothing but mattress. I had just convinced myself that he had crept away in the middle of the night to find himself a woman who didn’t have a 13 pound cat sleeping in the bed with them when I heard the soothing sound of his snoring and my fingers grazed across his pillow. “Aha!” I said in the darkened bedroom, “I have found him.” I disentangled myself from the cat and began to wiggle across the bed. Unfortunately I was thwarted by Ben’s pillow. While I was still stuck in the “sleep on your side” mode, Ben had apparently chosen to go immediately back to his old way of sleeping, sprawled on his stomach with his pillow not under his head like any logical sane person would have it, but tucked firmly beside him. I attempted to wiggle around the pillow but it was useless, he had that puppy wedged against him and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t pry it loose. I had to settle with curling up pathetically beside his pillow stretching my arm out as far as I could just so the tips of my fingers could rest against his arm.
I shan’t complain however, as Ben woke up from a very restful sleep, it was nice not to have a cat’s ass sleeping right against my face and have I mentioned the awesome comfortness of this bed? I know what you’re all wondering though and that is - how does the cat like it?
The cats were tucked away in the bathroom while the delivery men were setting up the bed and from the moment we let them out, Smokey, with the exception of food and bathroom breaks, has not left the bed. After the bed was delivered, we had to run some errands for most of the afternoon. We left Smokey sleeping on the bed, six hours later we returned and he hadn’t moved. The cat? He doth approves.
And while Ben loves the new bed, I think he loves this even more:
We got a King size bed and a flat screen tv for the bedroom in one day. At the rate we’re going, some day we might even move out of our single wide trailer. Whee!
