Mattress Pads

This is one of those It Might Be Useful to Someone posts.
All my life I’ve been a crappy sleeper. My mom said so, about my baby-and-childhood sleeping habits. Or not-so-much-sleeping habits. It’s certainly been true ever since I can remember. I think I’m afraid I’ll miss something if I’m asleep.
Anyway, I’ve always awakened about 4-6 times every night. About every hour, hour and a half. Recently I got to thinking about how it’s usually when my hip begins to ache—I sleep on my side, my hip starts hurting, I wake up to turn over (usually a certain Feline Dictator is sprawled on top of me, making it a complicated—and unwelcome (it usually ends in her waking up and stomping off into the other room, ears back)—process).
For years and years, we’ve slept on a heated mattress pad. These work—in the winter, you turn them on and they heat the bed without getting hot. One of these and a sheet and a down comforter, and you’re toasty even with the window open in the winter. In the summer, you just leave them turned off, but we never took it off the bed.
{Recently I was eavesdropping at Starbucks, I think it was (I love eavesdropping; I’m horrible about it) and listened to a conversation in which three women talked about what they’d have if they were Rich. One said that she’d want someone else to shampoo her hair, and she’d want clean sheets every day. This was amazing to me, as I hate other people washing my hair, even when it was down past my butt; and why on earth would you want clean sheets every day? I could think of a lot of luxuries that would come way, way before either of these would ever occur to me.]
The wires in the mattress pad are in sewn fabric channels, and those make little ridges all up and down the pad, and I noticed (yeah, so it takes me a while) that you can feel those when you lie on them.
Plus I’m getting leery of the whole sleeping-with-electric-currents-around-me thing, anyway.
Anyway:  I went out and bought a new mattress pad with a pillow top, about an inch or so of padding on it (our mattress has a pillow top, too). And I bought new pillows, since mine were the cheapest of the cheap from The Rat Bastards at Wal-Mart (one of my favorite people, Reggie, a friend of The EGE’s from high school, introduced me to “rat bastard” the other day when we were schmoozing outside the liquor store where he moonlights—it’s what his grandfather used to call him and his brothers and cousins, as in, “If you little rat bastards are going to be hanging around, you’d better get out to the barn and do some work.” This made me very happy. Now everyone is a Rat Bastard. You can be one, too, if you’d like.) Anyway:  so a new mattress pad, new pillows. The Good Kind.
And a New Thing to Call People. Yowza.
And dang if I’m not sleeping better. The last couple of nights, I’ve awakened [have you ever noticed that any way you write that, it sounds either 1) wrong (“I’ve woken up” or stilted “I’ve awakened”? I hate words that just won’t sound right no matter what you do to them. Pretty much like bagpipes).
ANYWAY:  only twice a night, is what I’m trying to say. Sheesh.
Good grief. I wear myself out. I’m sure that any of y’all, telling about mattress pads, could have done so in a couple of really simple declarative sentences. But me? Oh, no, not me! Let me try, though:
Mattress pads may make a difference in how well you sleep. If you have one that’s not comfortable, try replacing it with one that has more padding.
The End.

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