Adventures In Being Swallowed By A Cloud

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Whenever I’ve visited my parents in recent years, I’ve spent the night on an air mattress.  At first, it was my parents’ air mattress, which (like all air mattresses) would slowly deflate during the night until I was sort of “encased” in the mattress, which was both uncomfortable and creepy.  In addition to this problem, there’s the general nature of air mattresses which are…wobbly.  Even if they are the tall ones, they still do not feel like a real bed.

Eventually, my folks started borrowing their neighbor’s air mattress, which had the feature of quietly auto-inflating as it lost air during the night.  This did keep me from waking up wrapped like a burrito but still was not comfortable.  It was like sleeping on a bouncy castle, which I’m sure I’d have been thrilled about as a child, but as a middle-aged adult, it’s not great.  I’m going to say it’s a step up from sleeping on the floor, which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, quite a low bar.

Now that I’ve moved to live near my folks, I’m hoping not to spend any more time on any air mattress of any kind at their house.  But…what if people come to visit me? I have friends, I have relatives…where are they going to sleep in my house?

My realtor referred me to the Ivation EZ-Bed, which auto-inflates and sits on a frame…all of which it does at the push of a button.  First off, it’s in a fabulous sort of suit-case arrangement which has wheels and a handle, so it’s very easy to move and maneuver.  Then, it only needs to be unzipped and plugged in, and it extends its frame while it inflates.  It’s awesome!  When it needs to be put away, you just reverse the process.  It folds itself up as it deflates.  Upon deflation, it does need to be manually pushed back into its starting position, but that’s easy peasy.  Zip it up again, and put it away!  Here’s a short video of this in motion:

When mine was delivered, I noticed immediately that one end of its delivery box had been all beat up and then “repaired” with quite a lot of tape.  I thought that was a bad sign, but I took the bed out anyway, and found a small tear in the outer cover of one end.  My mother was present for the “de-boxing,” as I was sure she’d get a real kick out of watching the bed work.  We consulted, and agreed that it was probably best to return the bed and get an undamaged replacement.  I wrestled it back into its bashed-up box, and sat down at the computer to start the return process. 

I will say this for Amazon…they are pretty darn accommodating on returns.  It’s not always quite as straight-forward as one might like, since they ship multiple ways and returns also ship multiple ways.  So the options you have on one return might be completely different from your next return.  Nevertheless, I was most of the way through the process when Amazon offered me an option I hadn’t seen before:  they offered to let me keep the bed but get a refund of roughly 25% of the cost.

I stopped the return and pondered.  I hadn’t tried to inflate the bed, because I was worried that it was damaged in some way I couldn’t see, and I’d get it partly inflated and then it would get stuck that way; it would be a lot harder to return in that state!  Why yes, I do often think about worst-case scenarios.  Why do you ask?

My mom and I decided to inflate the thing and see if it worked.  It worked beautifully, so we decided to keep it and accept the partial refund, since that seemed like a really excellent deal.  The small tear was easily covered by a piece of some of my decorative duct tape.

Quite aside from the entertaining nature of its deployment (which I have been hard-pressed not to do over and over because it’s just so darn cool), this air mattress feels like a real bed.  I think that’s because it’s got a frame underneath it, so it doesn’t slide around on the floor and it has more support than most air mattresses.  It’s really comfortable.  Also, it’s bed height, which saves one from crawling around on the floor to get into bed.

I went ahead and bought pillows, a mattress pad, sheets, and two muslin blankets for the new bed.  If it’s too cold to survive with just muslin blankets, I have quite a large supply of knitted or crocheted wool blankets to keep guests warm.  I’m ready for company!