Failed Attempt

Next week we have to travel. I say "have to" because it is one of the three worst travel weeks of the year. Really why are we subjecting ourselves to this? I know traveling the day before Thanksgiving and Christmas is a nightmare in the US, but you have never been in a traveling nightmare until you live in a country with more than a billion people...and at least half of them are trying to get somewhere...and it is only on either a bus or a train (We will be on a train). This year we get to be one of the crazy people! Why are we doing this again?

We are taking a train about 4 hours north to see some friends, sort of. While there KB and myself will be engaged, and Avril will spend some playtime with several other kids. From what I understand she will be the youngest one there.

For nap time, the kids will sleep on pallets on the floor. AB has never slept on a pallet. Our three attempts at getting her to sleep with us in bed while at a hotel were huge failures, and we came to understand that she needs to be restricted when she sleeps. I know as she gets older, like now, she should be able to easily sleep unrestricted, but there has never been a need, so we have never tried.

We decided to try out the whole pallet thing, because who knows, she might really like it! We took the pad out of her pack and play, put a sheet on it, set it up with all her toys that she likes to sleep with (way too many for sure), and put her down for a nap on the pallet.

For an hour we heard nothing from her room. We were so excited! We thought we had success and we would not get embarrassed when our kid is the one who keeps all the other kids up during nap time. After an hour KB and I slowly opened her door expecting to see her sleeping peacefully on her pallet. No, no, no. That is not what we saw.

The first thing we noticed was the smell. It was a overwhelming smell of Johnson and Johnson baby wipes. Then we saw she was sitting in a huge pile of them. She had opened her top dresser drawer, that we did not know she was tall enough to reach into - yet, took out an unopened package of baby wipes and basically spent a fun filled hour of pulling baby wipes out of the package one by one. It was also apparent she has used some of the baby wipes to "clean" things in her room. She is such a helper.