On Friday morning the alarms went off and C and I laid in bed, staring at the ceiling fan.

“Ugh,” I said.
“I know what you mean,” he replied.
“We need a new mattress.  Like, tout suite.”
“Let’s shop tonight.”

And that was that.  The Ethan Allen wonder mattress that Chris has had since he graduated from Colorado State ages ago officially bit the dust.  It was squished.  Ready for the mattress refurbishing happy hunting grounds.  We were ready to bid it farewell.

After work we got in the car and headed up to what I like to think of as Mattress Row, though I’m probably the only one who thinks that.  Denver is LOADED with mattress stores and there are lots of Mattress Row-type places.  That’s because mattress manufacturing is big here.  As we learned later that evening, “Denver is a foam town.  Mattresses nowadays use lots of foam.”  Ah.  Well, that explains it.

We stopped at Denver Mattress first, thinking we could then swing by Mattress King, Mattress Factory Outlet and then Sealy Factory Direct (which consists of an open garage door with a few flag buntings and a “deep discount” sign out front.)  Once I saw it, I really wanted to go to Sealy Factory Direct first, but C urged me to stick with the plan.

We walked into Denver Mattress and we were greeted by Andrew, who showed us three different mattresses.  We told him we wanted firm, but not too firm, queen-sized, comfortable, made in America.  Easy, easy, easy.

There was one mattress in particular we loved and Andrew made up a file for us so we could be on our way to continue shopping around.

As we walked out the double doors back to the parking lot we both stopped and looked at each other and remembered how we felt that morning.

“Let’s go get it,” we said.  And we turned around and went back inside and purchased the mattress for delivery on Sunday.

It was a smart decision because Friday night and Saturday night we cursed the apres-undergrad mattress.  Knowing that we had our new, shiny, foam-y mattress coming, made our current mattress seemed worse than ever.

Today came around and tonight we’ll sleep on the new firm-but-not-too-firm-queen-sized-made-in-Denver-mattress.  It came with two memory foam contour pillows for extra comfort and this morning, we decided to top it off with a trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond for some as-seen-on-TV contour memory foam leg pillows.

Yes.  We are officially entering a time in our lives when we need to be COMFORTABLE in bed.  In fact, you can even soup-up the particular mattress we purchased by adding a package to make the whole thing fully adjustable — the mattress will raise your head or your feet or both if you want to be folded like a hot dog in a bun.   Yes, we BRIEFLY considered adding that package.

Sign us up for The Clapper next.

Sweet dreams to us tonight.