After three years of teaching a whole unit on how money doesn’t buy happiness (while my classes read A Christmas Carol), you’d think I’d be pretty dead-set sold that no amount of money could improve my life that much.
Last weekend, I discovered how very wrong I’d been.
Apparently, the amount of a tax return to the tune of about a thousand big ones is what it took to significantly improve our quality of life.
The purchase?
A new mattress.
But not just any mattress, friends–after years of back pain due to a too-firm, too-old, too-small bed, Matt and I decided to take the plunge and get ourselves a deluxe king-size, pillow-top Serta mattress.
We’re wondering now how we ever did without it.
Of course, our old mattress was pretty bad—Matt’s back problems had gotten so uncomfortable that we were considering finding a physical therapist, and I wasn’t sleeping much at all (although I had taken to blaming the fact that I’m almost 8 months pregnant). For years, we had thought the problem stemmed from everything else–Matt’s hobbies of intense dodgeball and racquetball games, my carrying a heavy purse, both of us maybe having slept in a weird position…
Nope, nope, and nope.
It was the mattress.
We now know this for a fact because we’ve had the mattress almost a week and magically, all our back problems have flown out the window, and I am actually getting a pretty restful night of sleep, even despite the fact that I still have to get up twice (once around 12:30 A.M. and the other time around 3:30) to use the bathroom. As a hardworking teacher, I’ve always looked forward to bedtime, but now both Matt and I actually daydream about it during the day–it’s been like sleeping in a really nice hotel for the past 6 nights, so we feel like our bedroom has become kind of like a vacation in and of itself.
Who knew, right?
In other news, I cut off almost 8 inches of my hair last month, and hardly anyone noticed. (Except my students—7th graders notice EVERYTHING.) Even though there are times I miss longer hair, it was such a relief to just chop it off—no more split ends, and no more super-long drying, washing, or straight-ironing times.
Oh, and I have the day off today because we just finished up the second trimester at the school. Yesterday, all my colleagues were high-fiving and freaking out that the school year is 2/3 of the way over, but for me, the end is closer still—
I’m due in less than 6 weeks.
And we still don’t even have a crib.
So I guess it looks like both us and the baby will have gotten ourselves some new digs to sleep in—
Let’s just hope she doesn’t come early since we’re not planning on buying one until the end of the month…
