Bed shopping with kids . . .

We went on a date and we bought a bed.  What a great weekend!

Go back about two weeks and I woke up in the middle of the night with a bed-spring jabbing me fiercely in the side.  So not a pleasant way to be awoken out of a lovely slumber.  Discussions with Jim ensued.  With a pleading, please, can we, please get a new bed?  Funnily enough, several days later the newspapers came out with mattress sales painted across the fronts of four.  Joy, oh joy!  Here we go, on an adventure.

Last Sunday we went to a couple places and took the kids with us.  It was as though we had invited them to the circus.  Immediately upon entering the mattress areas of the the stores we had decided to visit, the kids' socks and shoes were shucked and they set about testing all of the beds in the department.  Oh, good times.  It was a litany of, please don't jump on the beds.  No, you cannot run across the tops of the mattresses from one end of the department to the other (this could have a similar look to crossing a stream on rocks jutting out of the water at various intervals or maybe you could compare them to a stone being skipped across the surface of still water).  Where are your shoes?  Where are your socks?  And, to the sales people, no, those aren't our kids, they just followed us here.

For the most part, the sales people were very kind and good natured.  Perhaps because they work for a commission, I'm not sure.  A few actually vocalized that they were quite pleased to see such a lively set of kids.  I really hope they were being truthful.

Move ahead a few days, my husband wants to do some research about what bed to buy.  He's a Consumer Reports kind of guy and has to research everything.  So we begin our attempt at some research.  Everything in the magazines tells us that buying a mattress is to each one's own taste.  If you lay on it and it's comfortable, it's for you.  He didn't like that answer very much.  Weren't there ratings somewhere?  Advice on better brands?  Nope.  Go lay down on it for 15 minutes per side you sleep on, and if you like it, buy it.  We realized this could take a long time.  Right side, left side, front side, back side.  You could theoretically be testing one bed for an hour.  This was not going to work with kids acting like circus monkeys.  Lord, please, grant me the patience to get through this.

So to yesterday, my mom came down to visit and gramma-sit.   Jim was really, really, really sick on his birthday and we had a whack-a-doodle schedule that had us in six different places on my birthday.  She was going to look after the kids for us so we could go out with each other, alone, for the first time this year.  Happy birthday to us and double yay, we got to go to a movie too.

Cut to today, my brilliant idea, let's go look at mattresses again, they're still on sale!  My poor mom.  Love her and am feeling bad I sucked her into kid duty while we laid around all morning.  We did, however, find a new mattress and it will arrive next week.  The bonus, we paid less for the mattress than the total of our savings on the final bill. That always leaves me feeling pretty good.

I am so grateful for my mom and how well she loves our kids.  Ava cried at bedtime tonight because she wanted to sleep with bamma (it's what my kids call her).  I'm so thankful we found a new mattress and it was relatively painless.  My kids are going to grow up and they'll be gutting themselves laughing one day about, “remember when mom and dad took us mattress shopping. . . ?”  Yeah, families.  Good times.