Bed of Thrones: In a King-Sized Bed, Flailing Limbs STILL Find You

Six years after building a neighborhood bar in Portland, Oregon, my wife and I had finally returned to the welcoming arms of financial stability. And, after all those years of scrimping and abstaining, we found ourselves itching to spend a little money on something that would both mark our return to fiscal freedom

Being the impulsive one, I voted we fly to the south of Spain and forget the world for a week. My wife, ever the pragmatist, said we should pay our credit cards down and sock away some dough.

Bo-ring.

Obviously, my wife and I operate from different sides of the brain, but we haven’t made it 10 years together without learning to compromise. In this case, our middle ground was to buy…drum roll please…a bed.

I know…meh.

But it wasn’t just any bed. No, we were upsizing to a king mattress with memory foam that would give us extra elbowroom, aid our aching backs, and give us a little extra room on those nights when Little E would pay us a visit at 12 am. In our old bed, she bullied us, kicked us, pushed us to the cliff edge; now, with a mattress the size of Kansas, we would finally reclaim the night from our blanket hog of a toddler. That was the idea anyway.

And that first night was magical. We crawled into bed and luxuriated in a bed that didn’t tweak our spines into the shape of a flaccid Slinky. There were no sweat stains, no weird smells, and when I rolled out of bed in the morning I didn’t clinch my back in pain. Never again would we sleep on a potato sack full of gravel—we were real live grownups.

Adulthood, sadly, lasted exactly one sleep cycle.

The next night Little E, like an alpha dog, began to assert her dominance over our new sleep space. Although only 36-inches tall and 40 pounds, she swings her body around like a wrecking ball. She peppers your gut, legs, and privates with a series of kicks…and somehow manages to end up with every single stitch of the covers. It’s like going three rounds with Ronda Rousey. One night, after the new mattress arrived, my wife left town for trip, and Little E somehow performed an extreme slow-motion windmill routine whereby she kicked my side lamp right off the nightstand.

A king bed, it turns out, can only solve so much. When she stumbles into our room bleary-eyed and dazed and asks, “Can I snuggle wiff you?” what am I supposed to say? Only a monster would deny her.

Sure we’ll gripe about how tired we are the next day, but in the moment, curling up with Little E always sounds like just about the best thing in the world—at least for the first few minutes.