My kids are getting bigger. Normally, that statement breezes past my lips (or through my fingertips) with a sigh of relief. Aaaaaaah. No diapers to change, no portable crib to unload, no contortionist-like reach into the recesses of the minivan to buckle in each child. My kids have, in fact, become quite self-sufficient in many ways. But still, they’re kids. When we travel, they come with us. And, when we stay in a hotel, we book only one room.
While we no longer have to traverse around a mini nursery that we assemble like Ikea furniture in our hotel room for the baby of the family, the boys’ larger bodies more than make up for the freed up floor space. A crying baby is loud, but not quite as loud as three boys playing hide and seek between the beds. But what’s a family of five to do? Hotel rooms are built for a maximum of four bodies. Of course, we always book a room with two queen size beds. If we’re lucky the mattresses are, in fact, queen, and not the imposter “double” size. Yet our bodies, spreading across the mattresses like continents on a map, are growing unwieldy.
An adult sharing a large bed with two toddlers can still stretch out with relative comfort (assuming bony elbows and knees are of sufficient distance.) But our oldest son is now almost ten, the other two not far behind in age. We’ve come to accept that sleep is a five-star luxury that a growing family of five simply cannot afford.
We recently stayed in Ellicottville, New York in a fantastic hotel called Holiday Valley Inn. We could have ensured two nights of incessant snoring pleasure if we’d booked a second room, thus allowing my husband and I to horde as much bed space as we desired. But at $200 a night per room, we were content to ski with the reckless abandon of overtired parents trying to keep up with our even more reckless kids. We have helmets, after all. May as well use them.
Being in such tight quarters, some can argue, offers a rare opportunity for familial bonding. This is true. However, it also means that those irritating habits that you thought you could escape during vacation (think toilet talk, whining, picky eaters), tend to be just as prominent in your new oasis of pleasure as they were in your suburban house. Our youngest son, for example, pees his bed regularly.
At five-thirty in the morning (shortly after I’d finally fallen asleep) I woke to my five year old son staring at me. His little hands pushing me away from him and towards my edge of the mattress.
“Move,” he demanded, “Move away, Mom. Move away.”
“What?” I whispered back. About to lecture him about his need to show more respect to his mother, I suddenly bit my tongue. There was only one reason that he ever woke me in the early dawn.
“Did you pee the bed?”
He nodded nonchalantly, ”Yeah.”
There aren’t many options when one out of two beds is eliminated from a room filled with five tired people. It wasn’t long before the entire family was awake. After all, five year-olds aren’t known for their stealth. If it was any other family, perhaps they would have used these early hours of dawn to bond with one another over a game of charades. But that was out of the question for our family. The kids grew restless in about ten minutes and one of them poked another in the cheek – the equivalent of lighting a firecracker on July 1st, in our household. Needless to say, we knew after those first few hours of the morning, the nice, quiet guests in our neigbouring rooms would not be looking for any opportunities to bond with us either.
Lessons learned:
- If your child pees at home – pack a plastic sheet to go under him on the hotel bed. This is especially important for the parent who plans to sleep beside the urinating child.
- If you forget the plastic sheet, wake the offending child before pre-dawn and force him or her to the bathroom to relieve the bladder. While this will disrupt your own sleep, it is a small price to pay for the benefit of every family member’s sanity later.
- Really loud whispers that sound more like growls can be heard through hotel walls. So, if you cannot avoid lecturing the kids, definitely avoid all eye-contact with your hotel room neigbours.
