The last couple of weeks have been consumed with what we’ll call The Saga Of The Bed. Sean and I simply couldn’t handle the misery and sleepless nights that came with being squashed into a double any more. So we went shopping last weekend. Just shopping. And the shopping turned into the buying. And the buying wasn’t of a queen–as was the plan–but a king. That’s a lot of bed.

Our room is so tiny that this little thing, this little thing of the shopping and the buying of the bed, triggered a domino chain of pain and change, work, dust, frustration, and more than a couple of tantrums.

The plan? We needed to swap rooms with Gabriel, who actually has two rooms: the playroom and the “nest” where he sleeps. This entailed moving a shitload of bedding, clothing, toys and stuffed animals (his), VHS videotapes (his), and books (all of ours) between various spaces. It also entailed moving many heavy objects down a very narrow staircase so that they could be carted away by various people and charities. The whole thing was like a giant sliding tile puzzle, executed in three small rooms and the tiny hallway of our upper floor.

Miraculously, within about a day and a half of “the buying”, space was cleared and the bed arrived. The deliverymen were forced to bend the mattress like a taco and strap it like that for the trip up the staircase. In the process of muscling the thing up there (oh, the muscling), the banister broke off. I’m not talking about the thing just tearing out of the wall, though two of the fixtures did just that; I’m talking about metal bending and breaking… snap. Extraordinary. Let it be said that the deliverymen seemed to feel really bad about it and were very friendly, even before they broke the house. Sleep Country has been amicable in their handling of the matter so far.

Stay tuned for our next exciting episode: The Saga Of The Sheets