We’ve had this new mattress for almost a full year.  And what a glorious year it’s been.  Full of snuggly sleeping and cozy mornings.  Glorious, glorious money well spent.

We moved into our new house this last summer.  During the move we decided to throw the futon bed frame that we’d been using out and just put our mattress on the floor of our new master bedroom.

You guys, I’m not kidding. We have this gorgeous new house that we have practically crapped on by merely sleeping on a mattress on the floor, just like in college.

The plan has been for The King to build us a fancy new low bed (much like this one).  This was going to be done in The King’s spare time.

HAAA.

Needless to say, spare time has not been found.

Something else that you might have also forgotten is that in the over eight years that we’ve been married we have not owned a dresser.  “Where do  you keep your socks and underwear?”, you may be asking.  I’ll tell you where:

In used milk crates and rubbermaids in the closet.  (My crate is the pink one.)

Last week, thanks to my Christmas bonus, a gift card and a sale at IKEA, The King decided it was time to upgrade our milk crates and buy a dresser.

A real live dresser for my undergarments, socks, and jammies.

The King came home from the store and with the help of Babboo put our new dresser together.  I promptly filled it up and fell in love.

It was hard not to love it.

(My closet is the one on the left.  It’s 2″ bigger then the one on the right.  Believe me, I measured them both before deciding.)

The new dresser made such a positive difference to our bedroom that The King woke up the next morning and while looking at our mattress ON THE FLOOR decided to screw making our own bed and just buying a matching one from IKEA.

And again, with the help of Babboo, our new bed was put together.

And I loved it.  It’s hard not to love it.  Babboo calls it “mommy’s new big boy bed”.

The next day, we woke up in our new bed and discussed how much better our bedroom looked without our mattress ON THE FLOOR.  We were both amazed at what a change a couple of pieces of inexpensive Swedish goodness could make.  And thus The King decided to go back to IKEA (again!) and buy the two matching side dressers to complete our set.

And so he did.

Yeah, it took us a lot of years of marriage, but we now have a bedroom set. And sure, we bought it at IKEA.  But it’s ours.

And I’m happy.

And so is The King.

So tell me, please, that I’m not the only person who has rocked old milk crates for storage.

“The best part is that this apartment building has this awesome outdoor patio. And a pool! My apartment would be right above the pool. You know I’m going to be getting my money worth with that.”

Being as we’ve lived in an apartment with a pool, I felt the need to tell my coworker how, sometimes, living above the pool wasn’t such a good thing. I shared stories of drunken neighbors who decided to go swimming at 2am on a Tuesday morning.

He laughed at me as I shared my wisdom. I felt like an old fuddy-dud.

“No really, 2 am is not a good time to be awakened by your neighbors out by the pool!”

“I think I’ll be fine!”

“Yeah, I get it. You’re young and love to be the center of any party. But really, sometimes we all just need our sleep.”

“No really, it will be fine.”

“Just don’t come crying to me when you were up all night listening to someone getting it on in the pool.”

“No really. I’ll manage.”

And that’s when he pointed to his hearing aids to remind me that he’s totally and completely deaf.

“Oh right. Sorry about that.”

Dude, sometimes it hard to be reminded what an idiot you are.

So tell me, please, I’m not the only one to have done something like this. Right?

But most of all, I just liked being in the heart of all the action.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not really a “heart of all the action” type person. I would never actively seek any type of action. Especially not the heart of the action. But I’m totally okay with the action finding me, say, if I lived in in said heart of said action.

Okay, so now that we’ve moved safely out of downtown Seattle I can talk a little more specifically about our life in downtown Seattle. (I hate to be all “oh, scary internet can’t know where we live”…but um yeah, the scary internet can’t know where we live.)

But now I can tell you that we lived here:

Our old apartment is one of Seattle’s more iconic buildings. It’s hard to miss, what with the roundness and the fact that they put a huge display of Christmas tree lights up every December. Plus it’s located rightnext door to The Paramount, one of Seattle’s major theaters. So we just had to tell people, “we live in the round building next to The Paramount” and everyone knew where that was.

Good for us, not good for my secret life on the interweb.

From our balconies we had the perfect (perfect!) view of what was happening in the heart of the action, without having to be in any actual action.

(See, I told you I only liked action from afar.)

Like all the many riots that I heard and watched via my couch:

Then there was the time they filmed that Charlize Theron movie outside our building. I stood at the window, camera poised, just waiting for some sort of shot that I could then sell to People magazine for a gazillion dollars. Of course all I got was a possible Charlize sighting.

Very possible. Wouldn’t you agree?

Then there was the time Mamma Mia! came to Seattle and I actually had tickets to see it with some of my SeattleMomBlog lady friends.

I was thrilled (read: nerdy!) enough to stand on my balcony and try to get a picture of me with the Mamma Mia! tour truck before I headed out to see the show.

There was also the time Death Cab for Cutie was in town (yes, we had tickets. Yes, we also had a small child. Yes, we sold our tickets). And I woke up on Saturday morning to see one of the member of the band packing up after their show the night before.

There was also the time we woke up to watch the beginning of the staging for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade outside our front room window.

We threw on our coats (but didn’t bother to brush our teeth!) and headed outside to watch the parade from the front door of our apartment building. Seriously, we sat on the front row of the parade and watched it in our pajamas and slippers.

Of course, in pure Isabel style, we decided to move out right as the pool was reopening for the summer. Not being able to partake in pool time this year will definitely be missed. (Although we have yet to see any sun here in Seattle. So whatever.)

And not having a gym to use anytime we want, for free, will be sad. But only a little sad as I honestly only used our gym a few times. (Dude, using any type of gym equipment becomes impossible when trying to do so with a toddler around. Impossible, I say!)

But I’m pretty sure having a grocery store that I can walk to (!!) from our new house will make up for missing out on the rest of this stuff in downtown.

Yep, I’m confident it will make up for it.

I hate to say it, but having a grocery store nearby is the type of excitement that I’m anxious to be in the heart of right now.

So tell me, do you like being in the heart of the action or do you prefer being near the action.

I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to have kitchen drawers that aren’t broken. Or how it must feel to have a dishwasher that actually gets your dishes cleaner instead of dirtier.

I wonder what it would be like to have space enough for my child to run and play in. A place where he could set up his train set and leave it set up without fear of his mommy tripping over it and cursing it’s name. I wonder if Babboo would know what to do with this space, or if he’s been forever conditioned to only running in confined spaces, back and forth, back and forth.

I’ve also been thinking about what it must be like to be able to bathe your child in a bathroom where we can both fit in the room without the door being closed. Or maybe just a place to hang all of our towels on the wall. I’ve been thinking about how nice it would be to have a place where we could tuck Babboo’s toys in after he goes to bed. Or a shelf that would hold all of his books.

I wonder what it would be like to have to have a closet where I can keep my shoes. Or a place for extra bars of soap and tubes of toothpaste. Or our winter coats.

Heck, I wonder what it would be like to have a place to keep our stroller.

When we moved into our little one bedroom apartment it seemed perfect for us. Sure, it was much smaller then the three bedroom house we just sold, but it was only The King and I. Plus the apartment would be temporary. We’d only be there a short time. And like my mom always told me, you can live anywhere if you know it’s only temporary.

We knew we’d be bringing home our baby to the apartment. But dude, babies are small. They don’t take up any space. Having a baby in a one bedroom apartment would not cramp our style.

Plus, it’s only temporary. Until the new house is finished.

Can you believe it’s been over two and a half years since we moved into our one bedroom apartment? Our once tiny baby is now two years old. He has no idea what it’s like to have a place to keep his toys and books. He’s never had his own bedroom to go to at night. He’s never eaten a meal at home with his mom and dad at the table. The concept of multiple bathroom is lost on him.

As far as Babboo knows, tiny hallways are synonymous with playrooms. Apartment lobby’s are where you go to play with your bouncy calls. He thinks all houses have elevators and pools and that mommy’s do the laundry in laundry rooms located on different floors. He thinks you get your mail from a slot in the wall and not out of a mailbox on the street.

Babboo also thinks that daddy’s are always working and aren’t usually home for dinner or bath nights. He thinks mommy’s always cook dinner and do the dishes and daddy’s are only home in the morning before taking him to school. He thinks the only day you can stay in bed and snuggle mommy and daddy is on Sundays, when daddy doesn’t have to work.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all of this lately because this week something happened that we’ve all waited a long time for.

We’re giving notice at our apartment.

That’s right, in a few week’s we’ll actually be living in The (New) House The King Built. We’ll wake up, together, every morning and go to bed, together, ever night. And by “together” I mean, all of us in our own rooms. (Well, The King and I will still be rooming together. You know what I mean.)

It looks like it’s finally going to happen. And frankly, I can’t wait. It’s an exciting time for our little family. Big changes are a foot.

We moved to the first new house (you know, the one we built before the one we’re building now) and happily got rid of our twin size bed. We upgraded to a full size bed. But alas, we still rocked the futon mattress.

(Hey, futon mattresses are cheap and we were are poor.)

We’ve since sold the first house, as well as most of our furniture. Somehow in all of this we’re still rocking the same full size futon mattress that we bought over six years ago. And let me tell you, it’s not rocking us. Every morning The King and I wake up to find we’ve got another kink in our neck, or our back is all wacky, or we can’t feel our toes.

It was hard to admit it, but we finally did; we needed a change.

We started small. We bought new pillows. The new pillows rocked. We were both happy.

Suddenly the new pillows stopped rocking so hard. We were both back to hurting and sleeping terribly. I even succumbed to digging my old pillow out and using it again.

The King and I weren’t sure if our bodies were in pain because of the stress in our lives. I mean, maybe we were tensing up at night, thus resulting in a crappy nights sleep. Or maybe The King’s body was hurting because he’s building a house with his own hands. (I hear manual labor is hard. I hope I never find out if that’s true.)

Or maybe, just maybe it was the crappy futon mattress that we loved so many years ago.

Last week we came to a conclusion, we had to get rid of the futon. We had to suck it up and get a mattress made for the grown-ups we had become. We owed it to ourselves.

(Thankfully Macy’s was having an awesome One Day Sale! They practically paid us to take the mattress off their hands. Seriously.)

The night of January 19th will be spent sleeping on our new queen size real-life-mattress. And believe you me, I’ve got it marked on the calendar.

It’s going to be a joyous day.

So tell me, do you think a queen size will be big enough? Or should we have splurged for a California king? Dude, beds things are huge.