No Rest for the Weary

When our travels require an overnight stay, we prefer Country Inn & Suites over most other hotels. They are clean and well-maintained, have pools and fitness centers, offer delicious continental breakfasts, employ polite and helpful staff, and most importantly, all of their reasonably-priced rooms are two room suites with DOORS. It's necessary to separate Hallie from everyone else until she falls asleep, so the extra room allows us to do this without Tom, me, and Will having to spend anywhere between 15 minutes and two hours in the bathroom. (Which we've done.)

Unfortunately there were quite a few youth and young adult sports teams visiting the Oklahoma City area on the same night we needed a hotel room, and all three of the Country Inn & Suites hotels within a 60 mile radius of where we'd planned to stop for the night were completely booked. I had to reserve a room at a Holiday Inn Express, which only offered two-room suites with a small "room divider" between the two rooms. And we paid the price.

At 9pm - an hour after Will and Hallie's regular bedtime and after an hour and a half increasingly wild behavior - we turned off the lights and tucked the kiddos into their bed (bed #1). We let Will lay on the side of the bed closest to us so that he could see the television (the game was still on) and so that Hallie would be farthest from the "action".

At 9:30pm we moved Will to our bed (bed #2) because Hallie - as we could have predicted - made it impossible for either of them to fall asleep or even rest quietly.

At 10pm, Hallie went from restless to wild, and Tom moved from bed #2 to bed #1 in an attempt to calm her down. Tom somehow managed to fall asleep with Hallie climbing all over him, and when his sleeping body didn't react at all to her jumping and pestering and whining, she finally dozed off around 10:30pm.

At 11pm, with Tom snoring and Hallie talking in her sleep in bed #1, Will and I went to sleep in bed #2.

Between 11:30pm and 2am, Will kicked me in the back approximately 1,904 times and repeatedly woke me by loudly sucking on his fingers.

At 2:30pm, Tom woke up in bed #1, decided he didn't want to sleep next to Hallie anymore, and carried Will from bed #2 to bed #1. Of course this process woke all four of us up.

At 4am, Hallie woke me up with a clearly rehearsed song-and-dance about how monsters had taken up residence under bed #1. There was no way I was going to wake everyone up - again - for a monster search, so I let her climb into bed #2 between Tom and me.

Between 4am and 6am, Hallie pulled my hair, stuck her finger up my nose, pried my eyelids back to examine my eyeballs, whispered complimentary remarks about my pajamas in my ear, and eventually fell back asleep lying crossways in the middle of the bed, a position that allotted Tom and me approximately 12 inches of space each on the outsides of the mattress.

At 6:15am we gave up, got up, and made the kids come with us to work out in the fitness room.

After a long day on the road and another long day on the road ahead of us, we all needed a good night's sleep. We didn't get it.