You know that age-old question we all ask ourselves after doing laundry: Why am I missing socks? Where did they go? It appears, the majority of them go to Narnia!

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Not much new around here lately. Just the same old work-home routine. We finally got a computer set up for the boys after theirs crashed awhile back. We’re trying out the kid browser Kidzui. So far, I think it looks pretty neat. The kids haven’t been on it yet, so we’ll see how easy it is for them to use. It looks pretty easy. We tested it out by typing in some non-kid friendly search terms and found that no websites came up, which we really liked. It’s loaded with something like a million websites approved for kids by teachers and parents. There area TON of websites for just about every topic a kid could want. I’m excited to try it out. If we like it, we may pay for the membership, which is really, really reasonable.

Anyway, Here’s a Manic Monday meme for today.

Do you screen your phone calls?
Yes, I do.

When was the last time you lost your temper? If we’re talking the last time I really blew my top, as opposed to the last time I got mad at the kids, it’s been awhile. I’m not easily ruffled, I guess, because I’m so laid back.

When you’re lost, do you ask for directions? I usually look at a map and try to figure it out myself first (if I’m alone). If I can’t, then I’ll ask for directions. I’m directionally challenged, so I usually always take hand-written directions with me so I don’t end up getting lost in the first place!

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Finally, after 4 1/2 months of trying to get it right with Zach’s medicine (see this post and this post for reference. What a struggle it has been. We started with one pill a night. That didn’t work. Even with waking him up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He was always wet. And if he was wet when we woke him up, he would change and would still likely be wet when he woke up in the morning. After 6 weeks of that, we upped him to 2 pills a night. This was still hit-or-miss, but mostly miss. In other words, it was only slightly more effective than the previous dose. We gave this a go for about 6 weeks, hoping it would just take some time for the increased dosage to kick in. When it didn’t, we upped it to three pills a night, the highest dose he can take.

We weren’t really sold that the increased dosage would work, since none of the other had. About 3 weeks into the new dose, however, he started to wake up dry. A couple of nights went by and, honestly, I thought it was a fluke. You know, we happened to time it just right with middle-of-the-night bathroom breaks, the time he took his medicine vs the time he went to bed, stuff like that. But when a week went by and he was dry 6 out of the 7 days, I was secretly hoping this was it. Another week week went by and again, 6 out of 7 days dry. I knew this was no coincidence. One night he actually woke himself up and went to the bathroom, which has never happened in the 4 years we’ve been dealing with this. Last week, he was dry 6 out of 7 nights, again.

We had a doctors appointment yesterday and I was so happy to report the good news! We were really ready to throw in the towel. We’re keeping him on this dosage for awhile, then we’ll gradually start weaning him off. The worse case scenario is that that he reverts back to wetting the bed and we have to go back to his current dosage. He’s currently going through a growth spurt, and I can’t know how much of this current turn of events is due to that and how much is due to the meds. Probably it’s more likely a combination of the two. Either way, I’m sure glad we’re on this side of things now!

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Today’s tackle is actually kind of a silly one. Well, not silly to me or my kids, but silly to think of it as something I needed to “tackle.” It is, however, something I’ve needed to do for several weeks and just keep putting off for some reason or another. It required major surgery.

The boys have these stuffed reindeer. I don’t know who gave them to the boys or where they got them. We have looked everywhere online to try to find replacements but have not had any luck. The best I can do is patch them up until they are too decrepit to do anything with. We tried to take Ryan’s away (his is red) because it looked awful; nasty, dirty, etc. He cried and cried and cried. I took a chance, washed it, and (luckily) it turned out fine.

So today, I finally fixed Zach and Alex’s reindeer. Both are missing legs, but Zach’s is legless. Here are pics of my tackle:

Before:

After:

(No before picture of Brownie, but you wouldn’t have seen the hole on him, anyway)

So, there’s my Tackle It Tuesday tackle for the week!

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Brian and I have been mattress shopping for awhile. As a person who loathes shopping, I can tell you I was not looking forward to this tedious task. I found, however, that I rather enjoyed it. After all, laying down to shop? I can handle that! Anyway, we’ve done a lot of research online, been to a few stores before we were too serious about the whole thing. We’ve thrown the idea around for several months, but just hadn’t had the extra money. Hello tax season!

Now that we’ve dealt with Uncle Sam for the year, we decided it was time. Not just because we had the extra money, but because we needed it. We knew our mattress was old. It was old when it was given to us my my mil 8 yrs ago. We couldn’t find a tag to tell us exactly how old it was, but we are guessing it’s probably upwards of 30 years old. Yes, 30 years. That’s 3 times it’s normal lifespan. In other words, it was DOA. But, when you’re young and first starting out, you take what you can get. It didn’t seem so bad back then. And since it was free, that made it even better.

Fast forward 8 years. Neither of us were sleeping well. In fact, I can’t say that either of us were really even sleeping. It was probably more restless napping than anything. And what little sleep we were getting was as far from quality as you can possibly get. I was waking up every morning in pain. DH (and likely myself) was snoring every night. We tossed and turned trying to get comfortable. It was just awful. I was seriously on the verge of sleeping on the couch…or the air mattress. Either would have been more comfortable that our bed.

So, out of our research, the first thing we looked at (in-store) was a sleep number. And we almost pulled the trigger on one. It was very, very nice. But we decided that if we were going to spend that much money on a sleep number, it should probably be on one better than their entry-level mattress and we couldn’t afford anything other than that. So, as much as we liked it, we decided that’s probably in our future, but not in our present. We then spent the rest of the week researching and shopping, etc. Friday, when we were both off work, we did some heavy-duty shopping. One of the local stores was having a sale and we went to check it out. They put us through a “comfort test” where they had use lie on mattress to determine which firmness we liked best. Brian and I disagree slightly. He likes a really firm mattress and I like a firm, yet soft, mattress. I imagine this is due to the fact that I have more curves and therefore find a slightly softer mattress fits those curves better.

We tried several mattresses, layed on probably a dozen or so. And many of them we layed on several times. We finally got it narrowed down to 2 mattresses, both Sealy’s. One of them was a traditional inner spring mattress with a layer (or two) of memory foam around the hip area of the bed. It was comfortable for both of us, it seemed. The other was a memory foam mattress. We’d heard a great deal about them, but had never layed on one before. It was so nice! I had woken up that morning in pain, as usual. This time in my shoulder. However, when I layed on the memory foam mattress, I felt no pain at all. The others had muffled the pain, but it was still there, even if only very dull. Since I’m a side sleeper, the fact that I felt no pain at all on the memory foam bed was a huge light bulb for me. It also piqued Brian’s interest knowing that I felt no pain. My choice between the two mattresses was the memory foam. I loved it. The salesman said women tend to like them more than men because they have more curves and the memory foam fits those curves better.

We left the store and headed home to get the boys off the bus. We did some more research and headed out to one other store. We tried their memory foam and although we liked it, I found it not quite as firm as the Sealy. Not that that really mattered. It was all about price. We left there leaning toward their mattress because it was going to be cheaper. We headed back to the previous store, trying to decide where to go and what to do. It didn’t take us long to decide. They were going to be cheaper, even if only by $20. Seems silly, I know, but when you factor in tax, we were saving more than just $20. It’s more like $120 and that’s a big difference to us. We even bought a couple of memory foam pillows to go with it.

It was delivered on Saturday and our old mattress was carted off to wherever old mattresses go to die. Ours was already dead, but I can take comfort in knowing it won’t be alone in it’s mattress graveyard, lol. And after 3 nights of sleeping on it, I can say that I am so very happy with it. Brian is not snoring anymore. Neither of us are tossing and turning. I’m not waking up in pain. And we can both tell that the quality of sleep we are getting is leaps and bounds above anything we’ve had in years. I woke up today feeling the best I have in years, literally. I woke up today expecting to feel tired, and half-convinced myself I was. But honestly, I’m not. I can’t even pretend that I am. I can’t remember the last time I slept the way I am sleeping on this mattress, and we’ve only had it 3 nights!

Here are pics of our old mattress and our new one. Trust me…the pics of our old one don’t do it justice!

I tried to capture the “divots” in the bed; the impressions that were permanently put in place over the years. The pooch in the middle (if you can see it) is where, well, where we obviously didn’t sleep, lol.

We don’t know exactly how old our mattress is, but the look of the tag gave us an idea…

The new one coming off the truck. I was at work, so this is all dh got.

And the new mattress. Brian had it all made up when I got home, so again, this is what you get It has a protective covering over it, and I didn’t take it off, but this is what it looks like sand sheets.

And here it is all made up. Didn’t dh do a great job making the bed?

I’d say for our first ginormous furniture purchase, it went very well and we are happy with it.

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