Hotel rooms with kids

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.