When I married the KingofHearts, he brought a myriad of wonderful things to my life: adeptness to repeat verbatim any commercial he'd ever seen on television, the ability to talk on the phone with the length and enthusiasm of a teenage girl, someone to do brake jobs on my car, you know... the important stuff in life. But none, perhaps, quite so wonderful as a California King Sized Water bed.

When I first met the KoH, he was living in the apartment next door to me. He was the guy who moved in last, so he got the small room and his gigantor water bed filled the entire room. Literally. And I'm not using that word incorrectly. When you opened the door, there was the bed. And. Nothing. Else. And the door didn't even open all the way before it banged into the bed. If you wanted to get to the closet, you needed to climb across the bed to do so.

When we got married and moved onto a military base, the bed came with him. It was large, comfy, warm and inviting. You could cover it up with multiple blankets and pillows in the winter or strip off all the blankets and turn down the heater in the summer. No matter what the weather, there was a way to make sleeping inviting. I remember more than one chilly morning, snuggling down by his side under the covers and uttering those three little words that every husband wants to hear:

"Honey?"

"What, Alice?"

"I love the bed."

"Me too, babe. Me too."

Okay, it was four words. But I think he was just as pleased to hear them.

Pregnancy robbed me of one of the great relationships of my life; my love affair with the water bed stalled while expecting The Caterpillar. A little hint to all you out there who are considering getting knocked up: To a pregnant woman with excruciating crotch pain, no matter how warm and inviting the bed might be, sleeping on something that requires abdominal muscles to enter, exit, and move around in is not the way to go. If that doesn't serve as birth control, I don't know what will. So I was banished to the living room couch... by an unborn child who apparently had more to say about my sleeping arrangements than I.

Once the larvae hatched, I expected to immediately return to my long lost love, but here's another hint: Pain will not immediately subside just because you've delivered... and now?... you will be required to use those abdominal muscles to get up every two hours to nurse throughout the night. NOT making things better. So I moved the bassinet into the living room, declared it MY BEDROOM, and took up residence on the couch once again.

Now, four months post Caterpillar, the pregnancy pain has finally subsided and the bed and I are back together, if in a somewhat strained relationship. I've learned that absence does, in fact, make the heart grow fonder because after a full day of work, taking care of an infant, picking up after two somewhat larger beings, and listening to The Dormouse exhibit this kind of energy, the only thing I can think about - my one goal - is once more crawling under its beckoning flannel covers. I usually do this about 6:00 pm every night, due to the fact that The Caterpillar currently wakes up each morning at 1:00 am to eat and then again at 3:00 to pitch her idea for the new reality show, Wrestlemania: Baby Edition, which carries the apt subtitle, If you think you're getting back to sleep anytime before morning you've got another thing coming.

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this. Somehow, just ending with

I ♥ THE BED!!

doesn't quite do it justice (although that might make a nice bumper sticker). I guess with Valentines' Day coming up, I just had to pay tribute to the "other" man in my life.

Sorry KingofHearts, you've got competition.