We feel like we can safely say that we now have the largest bed in all of China!! We shipped our mattress and box springs over from the States, and had the temporary challenge of not having a bed frame that would fit it. So we found a really neat antique store in Beijing that also makes furniture. I found a bed on the Pottery Barn web site and printed it out, then did my best to write down the dimensions that I thought would work well in our apartment. I was mainly thinking of the size of my tall hubby and the fact that we have only one closet so very little storage space, so I wanted to utilize any space under the bed that I could. Which meant having a tall bed, of course! I just didn't realize how tall I was requesting until the furniture arrived this past weekend! I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but it is so large that I literally have to hop of pull myself up in order to get in! The top of th
e mattress is several inches higher than my waist line. When we finally got the bed into the room and set up (after Kevin and our friend Joel carried the frame up all 11 floors since it didn't fit into the elevator!), we all cracked up at the size. But it does look great and I have the under-bed storage space I dreamed of!We also had gotten 2 other antique pieces--one is a beautiful painted chest of drawers with butterflies on it that my mom and I both fell in love with and the other is a large wardrobe that also goes in our bedroom. Of course, the wardrobe was too large as well, so the men who delivered it quickly fixed the problem by taking a hack saw to the bottom legs. We lost about 4 inches in order to get it into the room, but it luckily started off pretty tall and we didn't have to loose anything functional other than the height!
When Ayi came on Monday the kids and I had a blast taking her hand and leading her upstairs to see our new furniture. She has been asking when we're going to be sleeping on a real bed, so we all wanted to see her reaction to the monstrosity in our room. We were not disappointed! She kind of gasped in surprise, then started laughing when she saw we were doing the same as I gestured to the bed repeating " hen da"--which means very big! It was a good bonding moment in spite of the language barrier!
The other pic is of Noah after I got out of the shower, having left Karis and Eli in charge of "keeping him safe and happy" while I was away. It worked! Evidentally we have another baseball player on our hands!
