I believe that we were finishing up with breakfast yesterday when Chris directed my attention to the nifty article Hotel sleepovers take creativity in the Telegram. I read this article about travelling with young children with interest; it was timely because we had rented a heritage house in Burin for a weekend (Canadian) Thanksgiving holiday, and I had become really reluctant to stay in hotels with Madeline because she insists on going to be at the same time as we do - whether that's 10pm (cramps her style) or 7pm (cramps ours).
We thought that we had dodged that particular bullet with our current accomodations - Madeline had an entire room all to herself in the heritage home. We brought her night-night light and her little CD player for her night-night lullabies. Neither of us expected her to wake up at 2:30 in the morning on Saturday, and refuse to go back to sleep. She wanted to go downstairs and play and read. I feel like I wasted an hour with my futile attempted to coax her back into a slumber. Downstairs, she was happy and w-i-d-e a-w-a-k-e. Neither of those words described Chris and I as we each took a wee-hour shift.
I began to wonder if the summer of crappy sleeping she'd experienced wasn't so much caused by sleeping in different surroundings (our room when we had guests, my parents' house) but by the trusty Pack 'n Play. She's somewhere between 35-36" in height, and the PnP height limit is 35", so it's getting kind of cramped for her even when she does sleep curled up in a ball. Who knows? Worried about a repeat performance in the pre-dawn hours on Sunday, Chris and I agreed that we'd go home early instead of subjecting the three of us to three nights of crappy sleep. Sure enough, Madeline met the day at 3am. I hung out with her solo until Chris was up for the day (and well-rested enough for the 3.5 drive home). I'm posting this from our rental house in St. John's, where I think I shall retire early tonight.
Darn. I'm sorry the sleeping didn't go better.
Sounds like you had everything planned out so well.
Your post rings true at our house, too. Any change in location or routine results in lost sleeping over here. Even having guests sleeping in another room can upset the sleep pattern.
Posted by: Emily | October 09, 2006 at 06:57 AM
I totally would have thought that the next night would have been better. That is too bad that you guys had to cut your weekend short.
Posted by: Jaime | October 09, 2006 at 07:08 PM
Sweet dreams!
On an unrelated note, how did you get your early archives set up like that? I use typepad and started the same time as you!
Posted by: Robin | October 12, 2006 at 08:35 PM