THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA

Most of us have have probably heard of the fairy tale about the Princess and the pea. In order to keep harmony within the small confines of this truck, from here on out, it is now the Prince and the pea. You see, my husband, has this extraordinary ability to know if we are one degree off center when he parks the truck. He never fails to lie down on his bed and instantaneously know that he will have to change ends in order to maintain the balance of having his head higher than his feet. Me on the other hand, could have and have had, blood rushing to my head as I lie down, and I will not change ends. Nope, not gonna do it, I am a creature of habit. So every time he does, I call him my little Prince and the pea.

Now, I will confess, and concede, that the top bunk is not the most comfortablest of bed. It has a split mattress, that if you do fold the bed up, there is a definite concave indentation in the middle of the bed when you open it back up. For that reason alone, we have stopped folding the bed up, and I have put up with less head room when sitting on my lower bed to fix meals. I figurered it was the least I could do, but Craig had other ideas.

Over the course of the almost 10 months we have been in this truck, he has bought additional padding to put on his bed in an effort to make it comfortable. When one was not enough, he bought a second one, and even with doubling that to make almost three layers of padding, that still wasn’t enough for my Prince to not feel the proverbially pea under his mattress. That is until today, when shopping at the Fred Meyer, where he found a 4 inch thick piece of foam rubber, which we both agreed should do the trick.
Back at the truck, I volunteered to assemble his bed, in hopes that finally, my Prince would have the good night’s sleep he has been so desperately seeking. I first took the bed completely apart. I rearranged and turned over the split mattresses trying to fluff them up to their original shape. Then, the first foam cushion went on top of that. Then the second foam cushion, folded in half to make it really cushy. Then finally, the mother of all foam cushions went on top, followed by a covering of a fleece blanket to keep them all in line and conformed to the bed.
I anxiously called my Prince back into the truck to try it out. The gleam in his eye as he saw the fluffy bed awaiting him was hard to miss, as he pulled himself up onto that mattress and boldly proclaimed that it was more comfortable than any bed he had ever been on before. And with that, at least the problem of a lumpy bed has been resolved and I doubt he will ever feel that little tiny pea I put under his mattress, but if he does, that just goes to prove to me and everyone else that I did marry a real live Prince after all.