When asked for the most important, life- and money-saving purchase we’ve made since having kids, I don’t respond with “food” or “a house.”  No.  Those things are obvious.  What has really saved our lives since having kids has been our waterproof mattress pads.  Not convinced?  Read on.  The photo shown here could have been our fate without them.

When we moved into our new place, we bought a new mattress to go with it.  It was fairly expensive, but we figured we spend 1/3 of our time on it, so we might as well make that time as comfortable as possible.

All was well in Never Never Land until “that night” that kicked our butts, woke us up, opened our eyes, and called us to action.

Smarty Pants woke up in the middle of the night that night, and we brought him to our bed to sleep it off.  It just so happened that he wet the bed that night too.  Our bed.

He doesn’t wet the bed often.  Rarely in fact.  But when it rains, it pours.  And it poured through our waterphilic mattress pad, seeped on past the pillowtop, and settled comfortably in the foamy core of our new, posh, mattress.

Luckily, the mattress cleaners came over faster than we could utter the words “microbial growth.”  We forked over the hundred bucks and they did their thing, leaving us with a soaking mattress filled with a chemical soup of cleaning agents.  We slept on the pull-out that night, waiting for the mattress to dry.  The spring driving into my back left me awake long enough to ponder the wonders of waterproof mattress pads.

We bought two – one for our bed and one for Smarty Pants’ bed.  They have been invaluable.  We would have had at least three or four more mattress cleanings and one total mattress replacement (for Smarty Pants’ mattress, after a night of diarrhea) without them.  That’s at least a thousand dollars saved right there, and I am sure there will be more liquidy nights to come.

So if you are thinking of getting a waterproof mattress pad for you and/or your kids, or if you have kids and don’t have waterproof mattress pads yet, I say go for it.  They are not so expensive and they save you lots of money and nights on the pull-out in the long run.

We bought ours from Sleep Clean and are very satisfied.  Sleep Clean is based in Canada – that link will take you to the Canadian part of their page, but they also sell and ship for free to U.S. customers, and their U.S. homepage is here.  Nobody is paying me to write this, I am just passing on the word about them because their waterproof mattress pads have served us well.

Our waterproof mattress pads look and feel like any other mattress pads.  They are comfortable to sleep on and really are completely waterproof.  For us, they have survived all of the following, without letting a drop of wet-stuff through to our mattress:

• breast milk overflows
• diaper leakages
• projectile-poos
• spit-up episodes
• bed wettings
• diarrhea (yeah, I wasn’t too pleased by it either)

You know if you have kids you will experience one or all of the above, and if you’re like me, you’ll experience them all at least once on a bed.  A waterproof mattress pad sounds almost too obvious, but it wasn’t for us until that fateful night.

So if you haven’t thought about getting a waterproof mattress pad yet, you might want to start thinking about one now… I can honestly say that it works, and I am sure it will increase the life your mattress by a year or two.

Flickr photo courtesy of soundfromwayout

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