Everything is feeling a little mundane today. Soy and I are back into the scramble of work. The kids are in vacation care which means cut lunches and lots of sunscreen. The washing is piled up after the rain and the house, which was immaculate when we got home because my mother was house-sitting and cleaned it to within an inch of its life, is now a mess again. And our cleaner has moved to Queensland.
To top it all off, I woke with a stiff neck.
There was a moment when we were away, I remember it precisely, when I realised I had had enough sleep. This is a very significant moment because I have not had such a thought in over 6 years.
I was swimming out past the breakers at Meelup Beach, at the very southern end of the Indian Ocean, just about where it meets the Great Southern Ocean. The currents were warm, the water was ridiculously clear. I lay on my back and looked up at the sky and thought: "I'm not tired". This was a revelation because, as I've just said, I have not thought that since I was pregnant with Zac.
When we got home from holidays the poor sleep started up again and we realised that our 10 year old bed was probably contributing to our failure to get enough rest. That, along with the internet, the fact we live under the main runway flightpath and the propensity to work too hard.
While we can't change much of that, we have now purchased a new bed in the January sales. Bed shopping was an eye opener, so to speak. We lay on a lot of beds, some of them quite expensive and uncomfortable (what is it with this visco elastic stuff? It feels like lying on play dough), some of them quite cheap and uncomfortable. We saw one bed (not the wooden bed head / foot mind, just the base and mattress) which was on special for $12,000. You'd want to get a pretty freakin' good nights' sleep on that bed.
We settled on a nice, firm but comfy queen sized ensemble. Perhaps Australia's most mainstream bed choice. A sensible bed with a sensible price tag. We now need to buy a bed skirt. That is a sentence I don't think I ever believed I would type.
Maybe it's the fact we now know our bed is hopeless or maybe it's coincidence, but we have both slept very badly since we bought the new bed, and it's still a week until they deliver it.
Would it help if you called it valance? Apparently thatis what the Americans call it. And it wasn't within an inch of its life ... at least a foot or two.
Posted by: pamela baxter | January 24, 2008 at 12:14 AM