That Blue Couch

A memory popped up in my Facebook feed, reminding me of the exact week when we bought that blue sofa - ten years ago last month. Oh, how I loved that sofa.

Last summer, I was a brand new mama, taking care of an infant, working full time, and in the process of moving to another state when our baby was 4 months old. (A little bit stressed!) Throughout the summer I kept telling people that once I quit my job and moved to our new home, I was going to lie down on my favorite blue couch and rest for a month!

I snapped this photo the day I hung a new piece of art
on the wall and realized that it was a map!

Moving day came. The couch was hauled out of the moving truck. In our new townhouse, the living room is on the second floor, so the men hauled the sofa up the stairs to put it in the living room. However, the tight turn in the stairwell did not agree with the fluffiness of the sofa. The men wrangled it, measured it, adjusted the position, but could not get the sofa into our living room. My husband and I agreed to put it in the garage until we could sell it, then I began searching for secondhand sofas online so we could grab one while we had a rental moving truck.

On day two of our weekend-long move, we stopped by someone's apartment to buy their sofa. It smelled like the food that had been cooked in their home (curry - yum!?) but we figured that it looked clean, and it was the right size, color, and cost. We put it into our moving truck, the next day hauled it into our living room, where it has suited us better than we expected.

Saying goodbye in the garage

Nearly ten years before that move, we were newly married, and the couch in our living room was an ugly floral Goodwill find - found by someone else at Goodwill, used for a while, then passed along to me before I was married. It sat in storage before we were married, then it served as the sofa in our newlywed apartment. Six months later we saw a post for a couch for sale, secondhand, because the owner was moving. It was blue, but we liked blue, so we hopped into my old blue station wagon and drove across town. My husband and I carried the sofa down the stairs from the woman's second floor apartment, loaded it into our station wagon, and it lived happily in our apartment. 

When we moved the blue couch into our home as newlyweds

Throughout that decade that followed, I came to love that blue couch more and more. I would lie on it when I was sick. I watched TV there after working long days as a nanny. It was my spot when I didn't feel well. I spent many hours on that couch when pregnant. As a new mom, I often sat there, snuggling my newborn and learning how to nurse her. 

Our little baby quickly grew into an active toddler. Our new-to-us couch no longer smells like food from its previous home. It's an IKEA sofa, so it sits low to the ground, and it's rather firm. Truthfully, it's not ideal for a tired mama to lie on when she wants to watch TV, but it's perfect for a toddler who has claimed it as her favorite place in the house. She uses a pillow or stepstool to climb up on it, and walks up and down along the couch endlessly. There she reads her books, plays with her toys (sometimes cuddling her baby dolls), and listens to music - or tries to command Alexa to play her favorite songs. Yesterday I discovered that she has been stuffing toys, hairbows, and wooden puzzle pieces into the cracks of the cushions. (Since toddlers are messy - buying a secondhand IKEA couch was the right type of investment! Note to self: don't let your toddler eat a pancake on the couch, even without syrup!) 

We finally sold my favorite blue couch. I titled the advertisement with "oh how I loved this blue couch." The woman who purchased it knew it had been my favorite, and the day after her husband hauled it off in his pickup truck, she told me that she runs a home daycare, and shared that several children were currently sitting on my favorite blue couch, reading books. Her note made my day! If I can't enjoy that fabulous piece of furniture, I can be happy to know that it is exactly where it needs to be. It's being loved by children and books (and in the evenings, her older children).

Yep, seasons change, our needs change, and the things we were once attached to must move on. I was grateful for that blue couch, but I adore my toddler who has claimed the new couch as her own.

This reminds me - did I ever share the tribute to my station wagon on this blog - I must go find it!


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I’m Betsy, and I live in the Washington, D.C. area with my husband, Mike. We have been married since 2008.

My sis-in-law snapped this photo

We welcomed our first baby in 2018. You can read about our long road to parenthood in these blog posts, or read our story in my first book, When Infertility Books Are Not Enough: Embracing Hope During Infertility.