A Birthday and a Bed-room

Over the holiday break I acquired a new addition to my birthday paraphernalia, as I mentioned in January. May I remind you about the birthday headpiece:
My brother's birthday is this coming Thursday, so Ryan and I invited him, as well as my sister and her man, up to the house for dinner. Naturally, as soon as he walked in the door, he was greeted by the birthday headpiece. I suppose the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, because he unflinchingly put it on his head and wore it the rest of the evening.

Is it just me, or should I be surprised by everyone uncomplainingly walking around with a stuffed cupcake perched on their noggins?

I was thrilled. I don't know which I love most: birthday paraphernalia, costumes in general, or bossing people around, but this deal with the headpiece fires on all cylinders.

We had a lovely evening. I made my brother a red velvet cake, as this is his favorite, except I made a healthier version, wanting to spare my unborn the evils of egregious red food coloring. This was something of a mistake, as the cake tasted distinctly of beets, which are among the few foods my brother finds unpalatable. Oops. I'll remember that next year. I hope it really is the thought that counts. Beet cake is kind of an unforgivable birthday blunder.

The greatest victory of the evening, for me, was having several men with substantial heavy lifting abilities in the house at one time, as I had a fiendish plan I was physically unable to execute.

When I was in college, a friend of mine had a sibling born into her family. I remember visiting her parents' home and noticing that they had a king sized mattress on the floor with a twin mattress right next to it. They told me that they had a "family bed" so that their little one could sleep by them instead of in a separate crib or room. I was immediately taken with the idea and considered the possibility of taking the family bed to the next level. A bedroom, I thought, could be exactly that: a room for bed.

Wall to wall bed. All bed all the time.

I didn't give it much thought in the following years as there were no little people whose sleep options required consideration. However, a recent combination of events have brought the notion of a bed-room back to the forefront of my mind.

1. I got pregnant.
2. We inherited a bed from Ryan's parents, who upgraded, and found ourselves with two king-sized mattresses and one bedroom.
3. I started thrashing like a dying carp all night long.

Consequently, I began a one-woman brainstorm. How could we accommodate all this bed? I tried selling our original mattress, but haven't had any takers yet, and mattress #2 was impeding any sense of functionality in the second room (which is where we are keeping the baby gear; it serves as a glorified closet) by taking up every single square inch of floor space, rendering baby clothes, our filing cabinets, and my clothes closet completely inaccessible.

I hatched a plan to move our dressers into the perimeter of the closet-room and bring mattress #2 into the bed-room, resulting in a room comprised exclusively of bed. Tonight, with three men over 200 lbs. in the house to do my bidding, the dream became a reality. You can pencil roll across the entire bed-room. Check it out, and while you're at it, notice the birthday headpiece:
He is demonstrating the pencil roll. I wish I could have gotten a picture that captured the extent to which the room is a giant bed, but it was a cell phone picture.

I don't know how I got so lucky to have people in my life who indulge my desires for them to wear silly things on their heads and create fortresses of bedding while I sit around and make lousy cakes out of root vegetables, but that seems to be my lot. I'm one lucky duck.

Who needs a crib when you can have a bed-room?