Lion and Magic Boy

Yeah, I know. I wrote already about how much I luuuuurve my bed.

So I lied.

Well not really.

But the problem is/was, the stupid squeaky air mattress I was using sprung a leak. So I bought another. And IT leaked. So I bought an un-organic but affordable and fits-in-my-car-to-take-it-home mattress at Ikea, and Nathaniel and I awkwardly carried it (it comes all rolled up with the air squished out of it and covered in slippery plastic) into the house and pushed it up the stairs and cut the plastic (being careful NOT to cut the mattress, thank you Ikea warning tag for pointing that out as I never would have known not to do that), then let it unroll and whooosh the air into it, thus plumping up the foam.

THAT sure was fun!

Yay!

And, oh, I so could not wait to sleep on it! I lovingly put on clean sheets fresh from the dryer (still warm!) atop the softy wooly but not very thick mattress pad, and then admired the lovely flatness of the new mattress, such a change from the weird wavyness of the air mattresses, the wavyness that I loathed, as the top of the mattress was tufted in these huge deep faux tufts, each one inches deep and threatening to swallow small children. It was going to be so nice to sleep on a flat mattress again for a change, all flat and covered with the finest in cheap flannel sheets that shed little balls of gray flannel everywhere (seriously, these are found in the most unlikely places!) and topped with my soft thick wool duvet that I adore.

I gratefully and with no small amount of enthusiasm climbed into bed that night, savoring the moment in the darkness. My new bed. My new, well, ME.

The damn thing is as hard as a rock.

And I hate it. I wake up every morning feeling like I slept in a tent on the ground. With, you know, rocks under my sleeping bag.

I hate it but I’m stuck with it. I can also feel the place where the two box springs under the mattress meet. So I can’t sleep in the middle of the bed, as it’s like sleeping on a huge branch. A branch that’s under the mattress (maybe I should check under the bed for actual branches. You never know).

So NOW, I have to pony up for some sort of mattress pad-thing. A topper, if you will. (Either that or get used to sleeping on a slab of marble.) And I am sort of morally and ethically opposed to foam. Which contains sulfites. Or PVC. Or something bad, really bad, for breathing. Ikea sells some, but they have un-organic materials. I may have to go wool. I’ll let you know.

Yeah, yeah, I COULD just buy another air mattress, but then what would I do with the Ikea thing? I can’t even turn around and go the other way while driving, you think I’m going to reverse course here? Now? After I decided that my new mattress was somehow symbolic of my newly-won independence?

Sorry. Nope. I’ll let you know about the wool thing.