Hotel Night

One of the highlights of the boys when we lived in Minnesota was meeting my parents in Rockford, IL for a handoff. They would go spend a while at Mom and Dad’s and then we would meet again to get them. In addition to the pleasure of being with Mom and Dad, they came to know and love “hotel breakfast.” Unlike home where they are usually cut off after one generous bowl of cereal, hotel breakfast is much like the scene in Farmer Boy where the table is heaped with food and Almanzo can eat all he likes. They wake in the morning to a feast of yogurt, fruit, waffles, sugar-filled oatmeal, and Fruit Loops along with a choice of milks, juice, and hot chocolate. I actually feel like a get a pretty good deal when I find a reasonably priced hotel with free breakfast. My boys can eat a lot.

But now, thankfully, our family is now close enough that it doesn’t require a two-day trip to hand off children. The down side of this is no more hotel breakfasts. The boys miss it and frequently ask me, “When can we stay in a hotel again?” I have decided that putting together a hotel breakfast once a month was a good solution to this unfulfilled desire and a couple of weeks ago I announced that the last Friday of each month would be hotel night. They all bed down somewhere together that isn’t their rooms (or mine) and on Saturday morning they can watch cartoons of some sort when they get up and have hotel breakfast. Last Friday was the premiere and it was a great success, except that I forgot the orange juice. (The food pictured above is what was left after they ate themselves silly.)