Not My Sleep Number Bed!

I have had a Sleep Number bed for about 5 years and I really like it.  K-ster is on the fence about liking it.  The thing I love about it is that when it starts to sag a little, you just click the button and add more air!  And the best part of that is that you can just push a button.  Let me repeat- you just push a button.  This isn't your camping mattress that you have to add air to at 2am and then collapse from the dizziness.


I had actually never slept on a camp air mattress until I went to Paris in February.   When j-ster,  my partner in crime, lived there for a year a few years ago, she bought 2 of those blow up mattresses so that when friends visited, they had a decent place to sleep.  When she left, she told e-ster to just keep them because surely they would get used over time.

And they had already started the plans to have the student exchange, so she knew that we'd be using them if no one else did.

So, upon arrival, e-ster showed us her living room and j-ster said that's where we'd sleep. I mentioned the couch but she said the sofabed was an atrocity, so we'd just use the mattresses and then put them against the wall in the morning so they'd be out of the way.  She had done that with all of her guests who visited that year and it worked just fine.

So, we each claimed a mattress and got to work blowing them up.  Each mattress had its own device to blow it up and I think both were battery operated.  I forget if hers was.  All I remember is mine.   And really, that's all that's important to this story anyway.

 So, I stuck it in, blew it up in within a half hour and left it slightly squishy.  J-ster's was done in less than 5 minutes and I was slightly envious because it looked a lot firmer, but I was sick of listening to the screeching of my pump, so I declared it sufficient.

Looks nice and firm, good for a week's worth of sleeping.

And Camp French Teacher was born.  Mine is the bed to the left with white blankets.

The first night, I really didn't sleep.  I was cold and actually put on a fleece jacket and was still cold!  I just couldn't relax.  There was a party going on in the building.  And I was trying to decide how I would survive 12 days with 14 students in Paris.  And I was fantasizing that I had earplugs in a bag that would surely lull me to sleep, but I didn't want to wake j-ster trying to get them.  And then I got mad about my need to let her sleep and let myself suffer and continued to wish I was asleep.

The mattress was the least of my concerns.

The next day, my mattress was slightly deflated and j-ster's wasn't, but I wasn't too worried.  The next day, it was even flatter.    By the time I remembered that I wanted to inflate it more, it was really late and e-ster had already gone to bed so I didn't want to use it for long.  It was really screechy and veerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry slow.  But I thought a little more air would be fine.  Until I woke up to find myself laying on a nearly completely deflated piece of plastic.

These trips to Paris are so exotic and luxurious, aren't they?  I'm so lucky to be a teacher and get to go to Paris for free!  And wake up on someone's floor, frozen and exhausted with a sore hip. 

So, the next night I turned on the  pump just as e-ster said her good nights and guess what? Of course, the 4 D batteries were dead. And since I had opened the little hatch to let the pump nozzle in, it was even flatter, if that was at all possible.

J-ster sat smugly on  her still inflated Coleman (mine was generic) mattress and we tried using her pump but we knew before we started that wouldn't work.  So then I thought about blowing it up by mouth.  But I knew I'd be dead before sunrise and it still would be flat.

Ever the optimist and problem solver, j-ster said "the vacuum!  Let's get the vacuum!"  I reminded her that these days, not many vacuums have that blow out end like the old ones did and I was more than skeptical, but it was getting later and later and I was getting more and more tired, so I let her drag out the vacuum.  And even though there was no visible hole for air to blow out, I let j-ster plug it in and try anyway.  There was a little spot for exhaust, but no way to get that air into my mattress.  That didn't stop me from momentarily trying to funnel that air into the little hole to blow it up.  I was nearing delirium.

(E-ster never did ask us what we were doing with her vacuum and midnight!  It was a wild week.  She was exceptionally busy at school and we were busy too and spent the week passing like ships in the night!  )

So, we tried j-ster's pump again with me holding the nozzle really firmly but it was a lost cause.

My only hope was the sofabed or the "clickclack" as they call it. 

Look at that super excellent mattress of doom.  And even better.....



This is what that luxuriant mattress sat upon!  Sweet dreams were surely in sight....

I was almost in tears at this point because the thin mattress on wood wasn't going to be any better than the pretty much deflated mattress on the floor and I wasn't going to get ANY sleep!  And we both felt like I shouldn't sleep directly on the couch cushions because they are white.

Finally, I got the brilliant idea to put my mattress on top of this mattress and MAYBE, between the two, I would have some cushion.

I put the cushions beside me so that my newly invented mattress wouldn't be so high that I'd fall off the other side.  And it worked.  But I spent the night envisioning my slippery mattress sliding off of the sofabed in the middle of the night and waking up with  my mattress on top of j-ster. 

The next day, our first mission was batteries.  And not only did it blow up my bed nice and tight that night, it did it in like 1 minute!  We should have known that 20 minutes the first night was way too long and bought new batteries right then!

Linking up HERE.