Milestones measured by where we sleep

This bed, by Shawn Lovell Metalworks, is easily the coolest bed I've ever seen.

Anyway, so Ingrid now has a toddler bed in her own room (which doubles as the computer room for now), and last night she slept in it most of the night. Until last night she slept half the night in a crib in our room, and the other half in our bed. So this bed is her first nudge out of the nest. She was so proud and excited to have her very own bed. We all are. She and Bea helped me put new linens on it, Ingrid put a couple stuffed animals in it, the cats tested it for comfort, and she called her papa from outside to show him her new bed. This new sleeping arrangement is the latest big news in the Ellingsgard household.

The bed once belonged to Bea, and when she moved to it from the crib/parents' bed, it was a big deal, too. And things only got more exciting when Bea got a twin sized bed, new headboard, new linens, etc. That was the last we saw of her in our bed (on a regular basis.) She was 4, and she went to pre-school in the fall.

Between my sophomore and junior years in high school I spent the summer in Japan, sleeping on a 2 inch futon atop tatami floors. In all its flat and simple glory, it was the most comfortable bed I ever slept in. And I was 15, across the world from home. Every morning I folded my bed up and went adventuring.

Before Chris, Bea, and Ingrid, I lived with a boyfriend. Towards the end of our courtship, I bought a bed. I claimed that it was for when we would "temporarily" part ways in a few short months, after my graduation from college and his departure to teach in China. The parting ways was permanent, and I knew that when I bought the bed. We would have been smart if we just broke up the day I bought the bed.

I gave that bed to a friend of mine a couple of years later, after it became a second couch. I slept in Chris' king size futon.

We got a waterbed when we moved into our first apartment together where we had no roommates.

We bought a new bed after we moved to a new apartment. I was pregnant with Bea. There was a short in the waterbed heater. If you touched the person laying next to you you each got a mild zap. Strategic touches were fun, but something seemed a little wrong about it. Wrong in the potential for serious electrocution sense. So we put the king size futon mattress on top of it. When we moved, we discovered it had a serious mold problem.

We're still in the last bed we bought. I gave birth to Ingrid in that bed. Chris and I dream of our next bed, when all our once and future babies have migrated to their own beds, and all once and future children have consistent nighttime bladder control. Then we're getting our dream bed. Maybe one like the photo above. Maybe we'll get a tatami mat and futon like this one. We're thinking memory foam.