![]() ![]() ![]() I trust my pediatrician completely, but parenting has changed a lot since the ’90s, when I was allowed to ride in the way-back of a station wagon and eat candy shaped like cigarettes. They all attended perfectly acceptable colleges and all of them take regular showers. She laughed right in my face, a real snort of a guffaw, and told me she’s been putting her own kids in hotel closets since the early ’90s. That was when I finally dared to ask my pediatrician if I was the worst mother on the planet. And again and again.īy the time he was 1, my son had slept in many closets and bathrooms around the world as I continued to travel for editorial work and an entire book tour. And yet despite the guilt, I did it again. Meanwhile, my husband thought this was a perfect solution - and also slept through the night. I was gripped by insomnia, Googling showers and mold and asthma as he slept soundly through the night. I was convinced that I was creating some sort of ingrained trauma that would stick with him for the rest of his life. We put the travel crib in the shower, and he conked out in minutes. Being a coddled first child, he was quite particular about complete silence and darkness when he slept, and the hotel room provided neither of these things. The first time we put my oldest to sleep in a large shower stall was after trying to put him down in the hotel room for hours in vain. Sometimes I even bring my own nightlights. #Spacious bathrooms crack#Before you get nervous, let me preface this with the caveats: I make sure the space is well-ventilated, I crack the door. (And adjoining rooms are rarer than you think.) Putting aside the exorbitant cost of two hotel rooms these days, I can’t leave my infant, or really any pre-teen child, in a locked room on their own. ![]() I am also not alone in stowing my babies and toddlers away in the darkest, quietest spaces in hotels in order to get - and to give - a good night’s sleep.Īnd I can’t exactly book my kids another hotel room to shield them from the sounds and sights of the rest of our family after 8 p.m. But they don’t know my toddler, a child who thinks they deserve to attend a rave if they see a single person in their line of sight during bedtime. I knew what they were thinking: Who the hell would put a baby in a closet? That seems dangerous - or at least fishy. Because the few times that I did reveal my real agenda, the person on the other end of the line switched their tone to thinly veiled horror. I do not reveal what I really want to know: whether I can fit my child’s Pack ’n Play or child cot in that closet or that bathroom, or even in the shower stall. I’ve learned to ask these things in a nonchalant tone, as if I am the kind of bougie traveler who simply needs ample closet space and a spacious restroom at a Comfort Inn. “What’s the square footage of the closet?” “Do you have the dimensions of the bathroom?” (They can only find the answer about half of the time, and when they promise to get back to me, I know it will be a dead end.) For the past five years, before reserving a hotel room to share with my now 5-year-old and 2-year-old, I have always called the front desk to ask a few questions about the room I’m about to book. ![]()
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