The Perfect Sleep Environment

I stayed up far too late last night finishing up a book that was so engrossing, I just could not put it down. Giddy, I crawled into bed, expecting to stay awake staring at the ceiling for a few minutes until giving up on sleep and coming out to my laptop to write here in blog-land. To my surprise, I instead drifted off to sleep in a completely accidental, perfect sleep environment.

I normally sleep poorly, at best. I have not been relaxed enough to enjoy slumber for a number of years now. My middle child has this nasty tendency to get sick in the middle of the night, so I wake at the slightest noise. I have a very narrow temperature window in which I am comfortable, so I wake when too hot or too cold. Let us not even mention the feel of sheets, blankets, and other bed coverings, and how they play a role in waking me when they shift, if they feel scratchy, or as I freeze or burn, and shiver or toss them off me as appropriate. I cannot sleep without oodles of blankets weighting me down, yet they sometimes cause more problems than they solve.

This weekend, I was shopping for a ton of items from one of those big box stores. I happened to walk down one particular aisle in the hopes of finding a mattress pad, since ours had this bizarre tendency to shrink each time it was washed, regardless of the temperature of the water used, and I could barely stretch it across the bed this last time. Clearly, it needed to be replaced. The store in which I would normally purchase such an item had been out of stock during my last few visits, and I just could not justify paying shipping charges to buy one online. The big box store came through, and I tossed a new mattress pad in the cart. Right across from the mattress pads were those extremely soft and fuzzy blankets that the kidlets love, so I looked to see if there were any that would fit on their beds. Alas, there were not, but I succumbed to the temptation and grabbed one for us grown-ups. Then I went on my merry way and finished my shopping excursion.

Once at home, I washed both of my new items, but decided I would wait until my usual laundry day to switch around the bedding. That day was yesterday. I was a bit leery of how much poofier the new mattress pad was when compared to my old one. I decided to add my new blanket on top of my old one, since I had been feeling like I was missing the blanket weight on top of me since we purchased a new quilt for the bed a few weeks ago, and also wanted to keep the older, shorter blanket tucked in between the newer, longer one and the sheet. Then I promptly forgot about those changes in going about the rest of my day.

I realized something was different the moment I slipped under the covers, still stupid giddy from a happy ending to the riveting story I stayed up to finish. Everything just felt perfect: the weight of the blankets, the temperature under the covers, the softness of the new mattress pad on top of my extra-firm mattress, and the way the newly purchased soft blanket held the other blanket and the quilt together so they stayed where I pulled them on top of me. I had long since found a texture of sheets that worked for me, so that was an added bonus. The fact that it was a random fluke because of two purchases I would not normally make at a particular store just made it that much more special. I was asleep almost instantly for the first time in years, and I even dreamed that I was raving about how I finally found the perfect sleep environment for me. It was pure bliss for an overtired mother.

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that two of my kidlets, who had both slept through the night for ages, with the exception of one night when an ear infection had kicked into overdrive, woke me up in the middle of the night. Oh, well. At least I know the new arrangement works for me when the kidlets let me sleep.