January 7, 2026

Important Household Update

I’d be remiss to not post about our new couch, just because each of our previous couches arrived with official announcements. The first one in 2007, which was monumental for having replaced our futon, which (unbelievably) suggests that we spent two years with only a futon for seating in our apartment when we first moved to Toronto—it’s so strange to consider the things that pass for normal when one is broke and 25. (The futon was purchased back when there were two futon stores on a single block of Bloor Street east of Bathurst, and would go on to become our daughter’s big girl bed when she finally moved out of a crib.)

By 2007, we were both gainfully employed, and so we bought the couch, although I can’t fathom now why we selected that one. Were our parameters HUGE, HIDEOUS, and BROWN, and this was the one that checked all the boxes? I can definitely say that it was comfortable though, the comfiest couch that ever couched, and we got it before toxic scotch-guarding was made illegal so it was able to rise to the challenge of our very leaky small children, and then once those children were old enough to leak less, we replaced it with a more stylish option.

Because it was 2018, it was a very internet couch, and even came with its own hashtag, and like all things on the internet, it would fail to live up to our expectations. The fabric got kind of gnarly, it was not that comfortable, and then one, day early last month, I discovered that the spring had poked through the bottom of the frame, and we were honestly relieved, glad to see it go, our internet couch. (To the couch’s credit, while the children no longer leak, they are bigger, and they are lounging on that couch perpetually. That couch never caught a break. There are couches that live in rooms where nobody ever sits, but we only have one room, and people are sitting all the time. It’s a hard knock life.)

And so now there is a new couch, one without a hashtag, purchased from a wholesale place in Burlington, and it’s just a little bit longer than its predecessor, which is good, because we watch movies in our family sitting four in a row, which has become a tighter squeeze as time has passed, and we welcome the addition of some wiggle room. But other than that, the acquisition of this couch has been mostly non-monumental, which perhaps is monumental in itself—I’ve stopped measuring life in chesterfields. Now in our mid/late forties, we’ve arrived at a moment where such a thing as a new couch is almost ordinary.