HOTEL

: an establishment that provides lodging and usually meals, entertainment, and various personal services for the public

Do you remember how much fun it was to stay in a hotel when you were a child? As a part of recent travels, we spent three nights in hotels with our daughters and their delight over the experience was fun to witness. Our first hotel had an elevator with a glass wall and a chandelier lit up and visible from said elevator. When you are ten, nine or six, it doesn’t get much better than this.

After a breakfast featuring a waffle made my an eight year old, powdered sugar doughnuts for each daughter, coffee for the mom and Mountain Dew for the dad, we obliged our daughters and rode the elevator all the way to the top, just so they could watch all the way up and all the way down.

The next night (at a different hotel) offered similar fun times. A and B shared a bed with minimal fighting and were even considerate of J, K and I when they woke early the next morning. Instead of waking us all up, they crept into the bathroom with their books, climbed into the bathtub and read. When tired of reading, they grabbed pop tarts and ate them in the bathtub, too. If I’d remembered my camera, I would certainly have snapped a shot of the hotel bathtub, littered with two pop tart wrappers and two books just before J emptied it to have his shower.

While J showered, B devised a game for the hotel room: she took the four extra large square pillows from the hotel beds and stacked them one on top of the other. Once they were stable, she backed up to the wall and got a running start before leaping onto the tower of pillows. Needless to say, her sisters quickly followed in her footsteps. I watched, amused – and thankful that we were on the second floor, with no one directly below us to be bothered by the thumping of girl bodies onto the hotel floor strewn with pillows.

Pillow jumping was quickly replaced with pool jumping as the girls enjoyed first the indoor and then the outdoor pool. Two pools in one place?! This might just be as good as mom letting us have doughnuts for breakfast!

One of the fun things about the ages my children now are is seeing them take joy in the small pleasures in life – whether it’s a doughnut for breakfast or an extra large, comfy hotel pillow. It’s easy for me to miss the magic of something as simple as a hotel stay. I’m so thankful that my daughters’ delight gave me eyes to see the beauty of the new and unusual, if only for a little while. I have a feeling I’ll look forward to our next hotel stay in anticipation of seeing their joy yet again.