My mom and I decided that we needed to make the most of our
remaining time in New York and are trying to check things off of our ‘bucket
list’ while we are still here. The
weekend after Easter we decided to take all three kids to the Crayola factory
in Pennsylvania about 2 hours away from West Point. We went the night before and stayed in a
hotel. I like to get a hotel with a pool
so the kids can swim and play and burn some energy off before going to bed in a
foreign and exciting place where they are not likely to sleep anyway. I usually book a suite so there is some
division in the sleeping area and the ‘living area’ so I can put the kids to
bed and not have to sit in silence until they fall asleep. If it is not dark and quite none of them will
go to sleep. We are not that family that
can fall asleep with the TV or a light on.
As it turns out the ‘suite’ at the Holiday Inn Express in Easton, PA is
a regular hotel room but instead of two beds it is a bed and a couch. As soon as I walked into the room I knew it
would not work. Not only was it one big
room but now we did not have enough sleeping spots for all of us (the couch
only pulled out into a twin bed, not a full or queen). I called the desk and asked to move to a
regular hotel room. It was less
expensive and we at least had 2 beds. Of
course, the hotel was totally booked and we had to stay where we were. I was not happy. I moved the mini sofa around to try to create
a half wall to block Allie’s crib from view of the bed where the kids and Gigi
were sleeping together to create some sort of separation between the 5 of us. I was stuck sleeping on the horribly
uncomfortable twin sofa bed and Gigi was in bed with the 2 big kids while Allie
was in her crib.
We decided to let the kids stay up an hour later than usual
so they were more likely to fall asleep right away. As usual, when planning for things with kids,
we were wrong. Allie was exhausted and
wanted to go to bed before 8 but we were all in the room together and she could
not sleep. The big kids were excited to
be sleeping in a hotel AND in the same bed as Gigi so they did not want to
sleep. We decided to turn off all the
lights and watch some TV. The big kids
liked this but Allie cried almost the entire time. We just decided to turn off the TV and go to
bed around 9 pm. Once it was dark Allie
fell asleep almost right away. The big
kids were whispering and talking to Gigi and every now and again if they got
too loud, Allie would wake up and cry. I
was shushing everyone and about 30 minutes later the kids were all asleep. If Andy and I were in the hotel room we would
have turned on the TV at an extraordinarily low volume and watched for a
while. Since it was my mom and I, we
just went to bed. The baby cried every
hour or so through the night, Drew fell out of bed, crashed, cried, and woke us
all up. He then would only sleep with me
in the twin bed that my 7 month pregnant ass would barely fit in. He was actually laying on top of me most of
the night. Well… when he was not kicking
me. Gigi wakes up really early out of
habit and before 7 in the morning decided that she could not just lie in bed
any longer. She got up and went to the
bathroom. This woke up Addison, who was
in bed with her, and then they were both up.
They decided to go down to breakfast in the hopes of letting the rest of
us sleep. However, when they opened the
hotel room door to the lit hallway after 10 minutes of whispering their
breakfast plans, we were all up… before 7 am.
It was not a good night of sleep for any of us. It never is in a single hotel room with
kids. In my next life when I have tons
of money I will always just get 2 adjoining rooms so I can stay up past 8 and
have some of my own space.
