Sleep Over (Threesome)

When my husband is out of town, or I travel alone with my children, they both sleep with me. Actually, they don't sleep with me as much as sleep on me.

I don't have any statistical proof to support this claim, but I would venture to say that my children are the most active sleepers who have ever existed. It is as though they view the mattress as a trampoline, and this is when they are asleep. My son is a flipper, who systematically rolls from one side of the bed to the other, leaving me with at least two appendages hanging off the side of the bed, My daughter's feet and head spend equal time on the pillow, but not as much time as they do on my pelvis. When I try to roll her bowling ball of a head off me, she instinctively holds on to my leg for dear life. And for a kid who has a precarious hold on her crayons, she manages to have a Vulcan death grip on my leg.

Part of the problem may be that both children has their own queen size mattress in their bedrooms, so they are used to being able to stretch and be free at night. This is not from any sort of parenting or sleep-training philosophy. Rather, it is a byproduct of our "Craig's List Concept." Having moved not only cross-country but within the same city seven times since we were married, including four times in a recent two-year stretch, we have become well-acquainted with the demographic who buy and sell used furniture on Craig's List. When making a long-distance move, time is of the essence, and we are not the types to pre-plan and make diagrams of where things will go in the new residence, so a mattress has to be flexible enough to work in an room of the house. In fact, when we moved back to LA from NY, we rebought essentially the same furniture we had sold on Craig's List just the year before. And this included three queen size mattresses. I know one is not supposed to buy used mattresses, but remember this was before the bedbug trend that is now sweeping the nation. And I swear we never removed the "Do Not Remove" tag on any of the mattresses.

My husband is taking a long trip this summer and we decided that we will bite the bullet and buy a king size mattress so that I will not have to suffer the trauma and injury of getting squished, pushed and pummeled in queen-sized quarters with my children. Not that I really think a bigger bed will solve the problem, because I have come to the conclusion that I am a maternal magnet and my children's cold limbs (did I mention my daughter's freezing feet??), nose-tickling hair, and heavy heads will still be dead weight in the dead of night.