Hampton Inn Room 420

I am often asked, usually rhetorically, how I do it with four little ones. I usually make some small remark about the craziness of our house, but with new moms, I try to respond the same: No one is watching you be a mom. Sometimes it gets a little, shall we say, messy... you improvise, you lose your temper, you get pooped on, you do dumb stuff. But at the end of the day, no one really cares as long as you have happy and healthy children.

So, with that being said, I'm going to tattle on myself and give you a little peek into the messiness I'm talking about. We stopped in Waterloo, IA on our way home to Kansas City. Andrew does not sleep well in hotels AT ALL. Our best bet is to stick him in a seperate room by himself. We ordered up a "handicapped room" for extra space and low and behold, his little porta crib fit into the huge shower in the bathroom. Perfect!

All of the big boys brushed their teeth and went potty and I shut the door and turned off the light so Andrew could get a good nights sleep. Five minutes later, Patrick has to potty. Then Luke. No one else in the room was going to sleep if they had to go potty, but I couldn't let them back in the bathroom or they would wake up Andrew. (You sleep-protective moms out there know what I mean!) So, we improvised. Yes, my little boys peed in the ice bucket.

And, yes, you guessed it, that same bucket got knocked over sometime in the course of the stay.

To top it all off, I was sleeping with Luke when he woke me up at 5am to let me know he had some pee pee in his undies. I can't tell you how awesome it was to reach over and find a huge puddle of pee in bed with me. Of course, we couldn't go into the bathroom. I took off his pj's and sent him into the bed porky-pig style with Scott and Patrick. He settled down and went back to sleep. About an hour later, I hear him 'whisper yell' to Patrick: "Your hands are feeling my bottom" Seriously, how can you go back to sleep after that?

So, poor room 420 in Waterloo. Pee on the floor, on the bed, in the bucket. Beautiful. The lesson of this story is: when you're at a hotel and they give you a little plastic bag to line your ice bucket .... USE IT!