I know a writer should never start with backstory, but rules are made to be broken, right? So…two years ago, my car got rear-ended by a teenager driver. Follow that up with two heavy-duty wood-cutting sessions for the family, and ever since I’ve been dealing with back pain. I recently started physical therapy, and DH and I decided it was finally time to get rid of that 20-year-old thing we called a mattress..

I had started sleeping downstairs on the full bed in the study/extra room/toy repository because that mattress was so much better. DH was still upstairs in the queen bed. Eventually, we found a new mattress–just enough soft with lots of support. Because we are on a pretty strict budget (read cheap), we brought the mattress home ourselves rather than have it delivered. Once we got it in the house, we immediately brought the old one down and hauled it to the dump.

I say immediately but it wasn’t quite like that. Folding the old mattress like a taco shell and dinging the wall paint with it while DH pulled and I laid my bulk on top to push (remember I can’t do much with this back) took us quite a while! Old farmhouses are not made for queen-sized mattresses.

Eventually, we realized that there was no way DH could get the new mattress upstairs and I was no help. The old mattress was gone. That left DH and I looking at a night together in the full bed in the study surrounded by a ring of the girl’s toys.

We can do this, we thought. So we settled in. Even with both of us out to the edge, we were still touching in the middle. No worries, right? Just a little cozy. We finally managed to fall asleep. However, Frank, our 13-year-old Labrador, has developed anxiety issues with his age, and even though we moved his bed downstairs, he had difficulty adjusting to the

change. So he paced. And paced. I had DH whose body temperature is about 20 degrees hotter than a normal man on one side and Frank whose breath is about the same temperature (only stinky) on the other.

Then the thunderstorm hit.

Frank’s anxiety begins and ends with storms. So his reign of terror started. His pacing became more frantic. His breathing got heavier. He tried to climb into the bed with us, which was already pretty crowded.

Enter the toys. The girls’ toys are scattered around the bed, and Frank started stepping on them, kicking them.

And the floor started to talk. Three words…Zhu Zhu pets.

At this point, DH leaned over me to swat at Frank and laid full on my back, which made me add my voice to the cute little voices coming from the floor. Needless to say my voice was neither cute nor little.

It was not a good night.

The next day, I called my brother. He and his 14-year-old son (who is already 6 foot plus) rode to the rescue and with DH, they muscled the new mattress upstairs. Too bad they couldn’t help us with Frank and the Zhu Zhu pets.