Does Your Warranty Cover Cannonballs?

When your nine year old daughter is invited to a birthday party in the middle of the afternoon, and it is located 45 minutes from your house, and the hostess of the party says, “You two should go on a date while she’s here – go see a movie or something – and you can pick her up whenever you want,” you and your husband do not say No.

And you probably don’t go on a date.

You drive around for awhile, and end up at a mattress store.  Well, maybe that’s not what you would do.  But that is where Cap’n Firepants and I ended up yesterday afternoon.  We’ve been married 12 years.  We know how to keep a marriage going strong, and it is not by arguing over which movie we should see and where we should see it and why should we pay this stupid amount of money just so we can listen to babies crying and men coughing up a lung right behind us.

When you think about it, the mattress store is really the ideal destination for a two hour break from your kid.  Especially when you and your husband have been sleeping in separate rooms for the last two weeks because the mattress in your bedroom has been turning him into Quasimodo.

And the last time you took your daughter mattress shopping with you, she made you wonder why the Queen in the fairytale stuck a pea under all of those mattresses instead of piling the pallets on top of the princess so the Queen could have some peace and quiet.

Testing out mattresses with Cap’n Firepants can be quite amusing because he has a certain sense of decorum which cannot really be maintained when you are trying to determine if it is actually possible to jump onto a mattress without spilling a glass of wine.  And when they don’t provide you with the glass of wine to test this theory, this just makes things more challenging.

“Go ahead, do a cannonball,” the salesperson told Cap’n Firepants.

“Yes, go ahead, do a cannonball,” I said, quite certain that it would take at least 5 glasses of wine (in his bloodstream, not perched on the mattress) to motivate the Cap’n to accept this challenge.  He surprised me, though, by leaping onto the mattress – not at cannonball strength, but certainly with a bit less inhibition than Cap’n Firepants generally likes to show in public.

“O.K.  I don’t want this mattress,” I declared, as the Richter scale pointer hit 9.8, and my head glanced off of the ceiling.

After dizzying lectures about foam density, breathable fabrics, and factory warranties, the salesman had me convinced that the only mattress that I should ever sleep on for the rest of my life – the one that would not only alleviate any back problems, but would prevent cancer and cure the uncommon cold – was the $10,000 one in the middle of the store.

“You could buy a car for that,” Cap’n Firepants noted.

“Who needs a car?” I asked, as I stared up at the ceiling from my bed on a cloud, and realized that, if someone paid me to write, I could not only work from home, but I could work from my bed until retirement.  Heck, I might even decide not to retire.

The Cap’n, however, did not want me to give up my car for a mattress.  And, for some reason yet to be explained, was not willing to give up his car, either.

This kind of put a glitch in this whole two-hour alternative to marriage counseling.

We ended up purchasing a “reasonable” mattress that, I’m pretty sure, will not balance a glass of wine, much less cure cancer.

And when we get a hole in our ceiling because I did a cannonball into bed, I am so going to blame him for not shelling out that $10,000.

Cap’n Firepants Delivers Our New Mattress to the House. He is a Man of Many Talents.           photo credit:  http://www.fark.com

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