My wife, my 1 year old and I have a trip coming up and we’ll be staying in a hotel.
Our big guy’s done great on previous trips sleeping without a problem, but this will be the first time we don’t have a separate room for him (we’ve stayed in cabins and stuff before, I don’t mean a separate hotel room). When we try to put him down and he sees us still in the room he usually just cries for us and we would have to end up going to bed with him.
I would love to be able to put him down and still be able to enjoy a quite night of playing cards or watching a movie with my wife without having to go to bed at 7 with him everynight.
Anyone have any advice?
My wife and I have done this with my kiddo, he is 2 years old now, but we traveled with him when he was 1 several times. So our kid is accustomed to sleeping with white noise on in his room, we bring along a travel white noise machine with us to keep that going. We have that going a little louder than we do at home, it helps muffle our sounds/ hallway noise after he goes to sleep. We usually don’t hold him until he is asleep at night, but on vacations we do. Our kid is usually so worn out each night from a day of so much new stuff he sleeps hard to start the night.
If you plan on watching TV, I would suggest turning that on before your baby goes to sleep so that sound is “baked in” to the white noise for them. If the TV has a music channel or a things to do at this hotel/city channel that usually works for us. We also usually turn off any overhead lights and just go with necessary lamps to try and keep the room a little darker.
If your room has a huge bathroom or closet that would be another option of where to setup the pack n’ play so they have a darker/quieter space- that tends to be pretty uncommon though.
I hope something I wrote helps! Have a great trip!
Yeah I’m hoping he’s so tuckered out that he just falls right asleep. We have a lot of activities planned that I think he’ll love.
Turning the TV on before he goes down is a good idea, it certainly beats my previous thought of keeping it muted with subtitles on.
The bathroom idea is great! I hadn’t thought about that, the bathroom looks pretty big so we’ll see if it can fit his pack and play.
Thanks!
Will he be in a pack n play?
Yeah he’ll be in a pack and play, which he usually does well in
Hm you could try putting it on the other side of the bed (between bed and wall if there’s space?), so the bed would block his view of you. Or see if the hotel has a room divider.
A room divider might be perfect if they have one. I’ll have to check when we get there, thanks!
There is always the cellphone as a monitor trick. Have one of you leave your cellphone in the room and call it. Leave the other one on speaker and muted. That way you guys can go a little bit away but still be able to hear if he cries.
We had an app on Android when ours was little called “Dormi” that acted just like as baby monitor. That was useful so we could use a Wi-Fi only device and each of us still had our phones on us and (mostly) operational.
A Slumberpod has been the best purchase we’ve made for travel. It is a pop-up blackout tent that can go over a pack-n-play or travel crib and provides a consistent sleep space no matter where you are. We’ve done probably 45 nights away from home in almost 3 years and the only time kiddo woke up in the middle of the night was the one night we didn’t use the Slumberpod. Highly recommend.
It depends on the room you get, but we tend to stay in hotel rooms that are set up a bit like a suite. There will be a separate room that has two beds and the rooms A/C. Then the other side of that room will have the bathroom, the kitchenette if there is one, and a TV and small couch that is often a fold out sleeper sofa. I admit, we often end up with these rooms because there are 6 of us, so smaller rooms are just not an option.
If you can get one of these suites, you can setup the pack and play in “the bedroom” and shut the door, and stay up watching TV, playing cards, chatting quietly, etc in the other room where the kiddo can’t see you. This works especially well if you bring something to serve as white noise in the bedroom area. We use a small floor fan and just have it running in the room where everyone sleeps. That helps mask any noise from the other room as well as any noise of people moving around in bed during the night.
So it might at least be a consideration if you look around the various room options!
This is what we’ve done every other time we’ve traveled, but it’s a work trip turned vacation, to somewhere that’s apparently insanely expensive. So this single room hotel came out to be more than we would normally pay for a suite/2 bedroom cabin.
Work ended up covering a lot of it though so it works out
