The Marriage Bed

If I were only half as sexy...

There are so many dorky things involved in going to sleep for Rob and me that sometimes I feel we're unfortunate sitcom caricatures, complete with a fake laugh track.

When I come to bed, it's not one of those awesome 80s videos where the girl walks seductively through misty fog. Unless you're referring to a fog of chemical smells. All my baking soda & peroxide, mint, listerine, glycerin, and grapefruit extract fragrances tend to be a little... well... overwhelming.

So once Rob dons a gas mask in a valiant effort to breathe (and I manage to make myself even more alluring by pulling my hair back with a scrunchie), we snuggle.

Not with each other, mind you.

Because somewhere early in our marriage, we bought body pillows on a whim. Snuggle-cheating with a body pillow was a slippery, slippery slope. Actually it was a luxuriously fluffy slope. One that didn't snore or smell or get all sweaty when you clutched it tightly.

And then for Rob's birthday I made it worse by making him a custom body pillow cover.

Because Rob loves soft fluffy things - (see two of the four items on his list here) - I had this awesome idea. For his birthday I'd make him the perfect pillow so he could feel like he was holding the cat with his shirt off all night long (really, if you have no idea to what I'm referring, you have to read this if you didn't a second ago). So I sewed him this:

As my friend Kim said when I emailed her the photo, "I don't know what to say...it has ears."

So then Rob snuggles up with his giant bobcat and we lay in bed, 3 feet and 2 body pillows apart, wrapped in a chemical-induced sleepy stupor, and we either read USA Today on my iPad together - HOT, I know - or start having dumb conversations that turn slap happy because the bliss of hugging body pillows at the end of a hard day is slightly overwhelming.

Rob: So what'd you email back to her?
Me: I said something like "Ahhhhhh!!!" and "Ahahahahaha!!"
Rob: How about LOL?
Me: It was more like a OMG situation.
Rob: ROTFL?
Me: Well, TBH...
Rob: TMI.
Me: FYI.
Rob: LMAO.
Me: PhD.
Rob: KSS.
[reflective silence]
Me: ...Did you just pull out my sister's initials?
Rob: [laughing]
Me: Wow. I am good. I can't believe I caught that.
Rob: That's because you're my American beautyberry.

Yep. His pet name for me is a genus of shrubbery in the family Verbenaceae. How's that for whispering sweet nothings in the dark?