As far as I know, my
children have made no progress whatsoever on The Blanket Anchor (TM pending),
so I am reposting this in hopes of some good news this year.
Father’s Day is right around the corner. My boys are young,
so I still get homemade cards, but it won’t be long before I start receiving
ties that I will never wear and bottles of cologne that I will never open. My
dad still has twenty-six bottles of Old Spice from me, and not one of them has
ever been opened. It wasn’t until I was in my early thirties that I realized he
never wore cologne in the first place. I want to avoid this with my own kids
before I have to find a spot to store thirty-five gallons of Axe body spray.
So, I am hereby publicly announcing what I want for Father’s
Day. I would like my three boys to invent something. Something specific.
Something that could change the world. Something that will benefit not only me,
but possibly every father on the planet.
I want my boys to invent The Blanket Anchor.
Here’s the problem: I sleep in a king-size bed with a wife
that has major temperature swings. You would think that the king-sized sheets,
blankets, and duvets on a king-size bed would be more than enough to cover two
people adequately. You would be wrong, in our case.
Depending on the time of year, my wife comes to bed either
on the verge of sweating profusely or on the verge of freezing to death. There
is no middle ground. At no point since having children has she been comfortable
from a temperature standpoint, especially at bedtime.
And, no matter what her starting state, at some point in the
middle of the night, her temperature completely reverses. During the winter,
she can reach up to two thousand degrees by midnight. By morning, she is
usually back to where she was when she came to bed.
These extreme swings in spousal temperature lead to a lot of
blanket movement. There are times when I wake up noticing that I am a little
warm and my movements are slightly restricted, only to find I am under a
three-foot-thick pile of bedding. Most of the time, however, it is the
opposite. Nine days out of ten I wake up without any covers to speak of.
My wife is in denial. I have tried to explain to her that
while sleeping she tends to mimic an Australian crocodile doing a death roll,
gathering all the sheets and blankets in a horizontal tornado-like fashion,
wrapping herself up like a roll of toilet paper. She refuses to believe that
she even moves during the night. She has gone as far as to accuse me of pushing
the covers over onto her side. When I asked her to show me how exactly to push
a blanket across a bed she just changed the subject.
All I can tell you is at the first sign of movement from her
side of the bed, I grab onto the sheet and hold on for dear life. It usually
doesn’t help. Anyone who thinks women are the weaker sex should try to get the
covers back from one of them. During the day, I can beat my wife in any sort of
physical strength competition like arm wrestling, but not at night. She is
approximately twenty to thirty times stronger when she is asleep. The perfect
tug of war team would be six sleeping women all holding onto the same bed
sheet.
And if I ever have to get out of bed to pee (or in many
cases with my boys, to clean up pee), I can simply forget about having any
covers when I get back to bed. Now, many of you unmarried men out there are
probably asking, “Why don’t you just wake her up and get your covers back?”
That’s cute. I miss those days when I was young and carefree. I’m not going to
begin to try to explain to you why that is such a bad idea. Just suffice it to
say that I would rather simply get dressed and leave the house in the middle of
the night, find a flock of sheep, shear some of them, and attempt to make my
own blanket instead. That would be less troublesome.
So there it is, boys. All I want for Father’s Day is The
Blanket Anchor. I want something that insures that the blankets and sheets I
have when I go to bed get to be at my disposal for the entire night.
I don’t know what it will look like. I don’t even know how
it will work. All I know is I want covers.
Until such time as the invention has been completed, I do
not want ties and cologne as Father’s Day filler gifts. I would simply
appreciate more homemade cards, with progress reports on The Blanket Anchor (TM
pending).
Thanks,
Love,
Dad
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2015 Marc Schmatjen
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