Hotel California

There was a blog break last week as we took advantage of cheap mid week offers and took Baby D for his first trip to a hotel at the ripe old age of 4 ½ months. Funnily enough neither Hubbie nor myself stayed in a hotel until we were in our twenties and only then for a family wedding. After that we couldn’t even remember the occasion but was probably another wedding. Things change over the years. There was Baby D last week, travelling in style to his first breakfast buffet in his top of the range, EU compliant car seat, dangly toys attached for in-flight entertainment, with the seat firmly clicked into the pricey isofix base for extra safety. Gone are the days when babies were left to their own devices rolling about in the back of the car, with nothing more than a Chivers red jelly carton for entertainment. Like Sparta only the toughest survived.
Anyway those days are long gone and I’ve accepted that packing light is a thing of the past. Surrounded by lists of what to bring last week, I remembered fondly how I packed for a years travel in 40 minutes with room to spare in my rucksack. Now a 2 day trip takes as many days to organise and once you’ve figured out what to bring, well lets just say it would be quicker to solve a Rubik's cube than work out the logistics of fitting everything into the car.
However we’re getting quicker and Hubbie is getting car packing down to a fine art. Last week as we drove out the driveway, we congratulated ourselves on fitting in the buggy, bouncer chair, car seat and baby, baby clothes, changes of baby clothes (and a few extra changes just in case), blankets, toys to keep baby entertained, some more toys which apparently aid development and intelligence (we don’t think they’re that much fun but feel guilty if we don’t get Baby D to use them in case he never learns his times tables because of poor encouragement at 4 mts), baby sleeping bag, spare baby sleeping bag (just in case), sling (just in case of meltdown in the buggy) and monitors (just in case we find ourselves in a suite and have 2 rooms). Thankfully we hadn’t travelled too far down the road when we realised we’d forgotten to bring anything for ourselves. Luckily being Spartan survivors of red jelly carton days we don’t need much and once we managed to squeeze a spare t shirt and toothbrush beside a bunch of nappies we continued on our merry way.