Hotel Madness

So I'm still waaaay behind in blogging.  My goal is to catch up before school starts (eek!).  We'll see!  Rewind to May and you can catch a glimpse of our week and a half of hotel madness.  We obviously weren't too excited that we'd have to pack up all our stuff into storage and us into a hotel for the lapse between old house and new house.  BUT we tried to look at the bright side and be excited that we'd sold the Rancho house and were that much closer to the new house.  It was also a tremendous blessing that this lapse would not overlap with our Hawaii trip (just the last two weeks of school) because I really don't think I could have packed for a month long hotel stay, kids with grandparents, and Hawaii.  Our hotel choices were already limited due to location, but even moreso because we had the cat.  I psyched myself up to look at it as an adventure.  Boy, was it ever that!!!

Here's a view of our first night...after Jason oversaw the movers all day (mainly in the rain) and made several trips from the Rancho house to the hotel (we nearly forgot the rest of the fridge contents!), I gathered both kids (and this was Reid's last day of pre-k) from two different locations, the cat from the Rancho house, and lost my mind somewhere in there.  A thoughtful parent had brought me a delicious dinner from Zoe's Kitchen.  If it weren't for that, I'm pretty sure we might not have eaten that evening.  The kids were up waaaay too late.  Dixie yowled all.night.long.  Work the next day was not exactly fun. 

Childproofing isn't easy.  Childproofing in a hotel REALLY isn't easy!!  Carter was into everything, even though I thought it wouldn't be so bad.  He could reach most of the counters/cabinets/tables.  It was really hard to keep him out of the bathroom, and we couldn't keep both doors closed because Dixie had to have access to the litter box.  He decided the toilet paper was even more fun than the litter box handle.

We geared up for the three day Memorial Day weekend, but this was the rainiest May I can ever remember.  Dallas had lots of flooding and it rained pretty much every single day we were in the hotel.  It was extremely challenging to find things to keep the midgets from getting too crazy.  Thankfully, the nearby Chick-fil-A had an indoor playground.  Someone loved his Chick-fil-A!

Another day, we went to Sears to buy our fridge.  We'd been waiting for a good sale, but it wasn't any better than the previous one we'd visited.  Reid loved the tractors!

At Stonebriar Mall that weekend, there was a huge Lego display.  Reid really didn't want me to take his picture, but how can you pass this huge thing up??

They had a big kids' area where they could build, too.  Carter had fun at the kiddie table and Reid enjoyed building cars to race down the track.

The mall was packed (holiday weekend? more rain?  both??) but we did make it to the carousel.  Carter wasn't quite old enough yet, but he enjoyed watching Reid and Jason go 'round and 'round.

It was soooo not fun for us adults (especially the mornings, when I had to figure out how to juggle a baby, a four year old, my purse and school computer/bag while simultaneously attempting to gather breakfast in a lobby full of construction workers) and we had many hiccups along the way, but I'm pretty sure the boys will remember this adventure for quite some time.  They loved their brother time!  Baths were full of giggles and splashing.  Carter must've had enough of the hotel by the end--he decided to poop in the tub the last two nights we were there.  Thankfully, germophobic me had packed plenty of Clorox wipes and Lysol spray.

They both loved sharing a room, but it was virtually impossible for us to get them to sleep anywhere near their normal bedtime.  The mini fridge and microwave were in their room, too, so that interfered with Jason's and my eating dinner.  By the end, we gave up and mainly had take out, but the hotel door was in their room, too! 

Reid made up a game called "Pop Pop Squishy" that they played each night.  This video isn't the best, but you can at least get the idea.  

Thankfully, Dixie settled down after that first night and didn't yowl constantly.  She discovered that pretty much the only place that was kid-free in the hotel room was on the bed, which was too tall for Carter to reach.  She wasn't too excited when Reid decided to invade it.  It was also pretty comical because she could only jump up that high about 25% of the time.  We ended up putting a chair at the end of the bed for her to use as a stool.

All in all, we can look back and laugh now.  I'm not quite sure how we made it through that insanity during an already insane part of the school year, but it made moving into the new house all that much better!