We are spending all free moments cleaning, boxing up and going through our possessions in an attempt to make our house look more presentable to put it on the market for sale and less like it was just broken into and someone was searching for a toy... or like the contents of a pre-school were dumped all over it. You get the picture.
So, one item that had to go was our beloved pretend trampoline, otherwise known as a forty year old twin mattress that lived and loved on the floor of the kids room. We got Jove a shiny, new mattress set when he moved into a big boy bed many years ago and we put the old mattress, that had belonged to my great-grandmother in Houghton Lake, Michigan, onto the floor intending to put it out at the curb on bulk garbage day. Jove decided he loved having an old mattress on the floor and declared that it was going to stay and he jumped on it for an hour straight to prove his point of how awesome it was. So, it stayed; being jumped on, napped on, nursed on and hosting house guests.
A couple of weeks ago we decided that we had to get rid of it, finally.
We can't show the house to prospective buyers with a mattress on the floor and carting it to a new location and storing it in the meantime seems impractical. So, we talked to the kids about it and even gave them a final night of jumping, but I wasn't prepared for how emotional saying goodbye to the mattress was going to be. Jove protested and recruited Miranda to his cause. He cried and argued. Finally, he decided that he would survive if we took a picture of it to remember it. He also said we should write stories about it and maybe I could make a scrapbook page about it.
For a couple of days I felt very emotional about the whole thing, probably more about moving and saying goodbye to this house than the mattress....
goodbye, pretend trampoline.
