I slept on a cloud last night. A really firm, sweet-smelling, wide cloud. Josh called from Bahrain on Tuesday night to tell me that our mattress was finished early and they would be able to deliver it on Wednesday morning. Happy day!
When the mattress people pulled up, I was about to remove the baby gates from the stairs to make it easier for the men to carry the pieces to the second floor when Lucy said, “Oh no madame, they will just lift them up. Leave them there.” Then I really saw her in action when the movers were getting ready to set up the bed. Speaking to them in Hindi she told them to take apart my old bed, to put the mattress and boxspring against the wall and directed them to wait until she could get the vacuum to clean the area under the bed before she allowed them to set up the new bed.
After all the pieces were in place she decided it wasn’t safe to have the old metal bed frame in the bedroom where the baby crawls around on the floor so she told one of the mover guys to take it upstairs to the third floor to store it out of the way. And they did exactly as she directed them without a peep of protest. I guess they knew that she was higher than them in the hired help pecking order.
As soon as they left she was pulling out sheets to make the bed. I don’t have king size sheets (I ordered them, but because the bed came early they hadn’t arrived yet) so she remade the bed using a flat sheet on the bottom. I went out to buy a set of sheets, but when I got to the store all the measurements were in centimeters and I had no idea if my bed was 180 cm x 205 cm or 155 cm x 200 or even 200 cm x 210 . . . ack! I couldn’t even picture how big those dimensions were. It was the first time I was really wishing I had an iphone cause I would have been able to google the answer in 5 seconds.
Instead I took the low-tech route and went to the furniture department to see if I could eyeball the display beds and figure it out that way, but even mattresses that were the same size looked different depending on which bed frame they were in. I knew whichever size sheets I bought would end up being the wrong ones so I left without purchasing anything. Last night I got out my tape measure and it turns out I need the 180 cm size (the bigger one must be a California King) so I plan to go back today and get the right ones.
Of course, they still could be the wrong size if they are like the sheets in Egypt. We bought a set of queen sheets for our queen size mattress and the fitted sheet didn’t even come close to fitting over the 4 corners of the mattress. I should have known the price was too good to be true. I think they cost less than $10 — and no, I didn’t return them because I actually liked the pillowcases (they were really soft) and because I never return anything. Ever. It always feels like too much work and it makes me nervous and I never save receipts . . . but I never buy something unless I’m absolutely positive I want it. So these new sheets? They better work out or I’m going to have a lot of new fort-making material around my house.