My husband and I are going to buy a new bed today. Here’s the funny thing: This will be the 5th bed we have purchased (not counting our futon) in our 6 1/2 years of marriage! Why five beds? It’s a bit of a long story…

When we first got married, we had a queen-sized pillow top that my grandparents had bought me a year before. I had moved into an apartment so they bought me a bed for Christmas, and I was thinking ahead to marriage so I got the queen size then. The futon we bought shortly before we got married to have a guest bed in our tiny apartment – dual purpose furniture was the only thing that would fit!

Then we bought a real guest bed when we moved to West Seneca, NY, about seven months after getting married, just after Travis finished seminary. We bought a bunch of furniture at once (stupid move! It took forever to pay it off!) including a double bed for one of the many bedrooms we had in that house. We still have that bed.

Our first dog had some bladder issues (ok, a lot of issues). Anyway, she tended to lose function all over the house whenever she heard thunder, fireworks, a car’s radio, the television… you get the picture. And she lost it all over our bed, the one my grandparents bought us.

So it was off to the mattress store. We bought a new bed, but sometime after the trial period that all mattress companies give you we found ourselves with slowly forming back issues. We moved to Springville in the interim, and visited the chiropractor who recommended something in the memory foam line.

So far, that’s two beds we purchased ourselves. We gave the old bed to a couple from church who needed it, and headed to a new store to pick out a memory foam mattress. I was a bit apprehensive about the potential heat transfer, but it’s actually not been bad. Anyway, we purchased a set that had a 20 year warranty. Good thing, because about two years later the top layer had shifted so that we had a ridge down the middle of our bed with indentations for each of us. The company came out to check it, agreed that it was a warranty issue, and we learned that the model was no longer being manufactured, so guess what? We had to go and pick out bed #4! We have had our current bed for over a year now and no problems with it.

The reason we are shopping again is because my parents, who are very tall, called me to tell me they hate sleeping on the double bed when they come to visit. Remember, that was the first bed we bought. It was a money-saving measure at the time. So my parents said they would buy us a new bed for our guestroom, a queen size, because they want to be more comfortable when they visit us. They went to Ashley Furniture, the only furniture store that is in both Nebraska and New York (to my knowledge), picked out the bed, and sent us a check to cover the cost plus tax and delivery. Works for me!