OK.
Here we go into the third week of January and so far, of all the new habits that I am supposed to be forming, the only one that is sticking is the gym, and only because a Certain Individual challenged me (by accidentally pushing a button on his Apple Watch) to a fitness competition which I CAN NOT lose. But hey, one habit forming is better than none. I have been doing more reading... and a titch more writing, maybe this week will be the trendsetter for one of those. I will work on it.
I spent a lot of time last week that would have been well used reading some of my six-foot shelf of unread books or writing the next bestselling novel, researching mattresses instead. I have decided that after 6 years of blaming poor fitness habits, being overweight, bad genes and a variety of other innocent scapegoats for my chronic back pain, that it's actually the relatively expensive mattress that I bought on an ill-informed whim 6 years ago to help with, you guessed it, chronic back pain. My bed is nice, but there are two things wrong with it: 1) It is as soft as a sea of marshmallows and 2) it's a queen size.
What could possibly be wrong with a sea of marshmallows, you ask? Nothing, unless it is a queen-sized sea of marshmallows which you are trying to share with a Certain Individual who finds his sense of self dead center in a bed, either for fear of falling out or relinquishing space to Anyone Else (namely me). He says it's about cuddling. I say it's about a space-scarcity mentality, and spend my nights gripping the uber-squishy edge of my 1/8th of the mattress, all muscles clenched in an effort to not fall onto to floor. So my back hurts. Or maybe the mattress and the Individual are just more innocent scapegoats, but either way, I need something bigger and harder. AAAnd that's what she said.
ANYWAY, I've been looking/shopping/researching/testing mattresses for a couple of weeks, and the only thing I decided for sure was that there are far too many options. Even after ruling out a foam bed of any type and knowing I wanted innerspring, there were still too many possibilities. I ran into a serious case of decision paralysis after spending hours combing through online reviews, consumer reports, Facebook polls and reading the mattress propaganda shopped heavily to me on Instagram ads the second the slightest thought of a mattress flitted through my brain. I heard a lot of good feedback about SleepNumber, but I don't like the idea of one more electronically controlled thing in my room, and my current bed is a Tempurpedic (also popular, but expensive), which is wonderful, but this model is too soft. I filtered all of the input down to a handful of major brands based on overall reviews/price combinations: Avocado Green, Saatva and Simmons Beautyrest. Hard core Insta marketing and the hipster-esque image of Avocado Green spoke to me, moreso than the matronly tradition of a Beautyrest, but as far as price point, long term durability, and the best broad-spectrum comfort for a side sleeper with back issues and a bedhog partner, I kept coming back to the Saatva.
Lucky for me, my sister in law just bought a new bed from Saatva, which started the whole thought process, since I got to sleep on her old bed (a Beautyrest, which I liked) when I stayed at their house in D.C., and I also got to help usher in the new mattress via the company's free "white glove delivery," where two nice young men carefully squished the king-sized masterpiece up her barely queen-sized stairway, into the bedroom, unwrapped it and vanished along with all of the trappings of mattress delivery, the whole while a small dog with certain paranoid tendencies told them loudly that they weren't allowed in her mom's bedroom.
So after numbing my brain with 600,000 mattress options and at least as many opinions, I hit the SIL up for her three-week report on the new bed. She told me that my brother insists it's just like the old bed, only bigger, which sounds exactly like something my brother would say, but for her part, she was happy with it. Being one of the only first-hand, recent-experience testimonials, and because it was impossible to find any bad reviews on the mattress that she had purchased, and because a Certain Individual was absolutely done giving input on the matter, I decided to follow suit and ordered from the same company.
I will report back in few weeks about whether A) the back pain is any better B) the whole bed-switching process results in any new drama and C) whether the mattress and/or company is really as good as they sound. I mean, the pictures look amazing, and if you know me, you'll know that it's irrationally important to me that the mattress no one will ever see looks as good as it feels. In the meantime, if you are mattress shopping, I have all the latest info.
