Cards in the bathroom

Some of you may have noticed my frequent references to 'cards in the bathroom' and wondered what I'm talking about. Read on...

Picture the scene. It's August and you're staying in a hotel in Spain. You've had dinner, maybe gone for a walk or a drink or watched the hotel entertainment, and it's now 10.00pm* (*replace with an appropriate bedtime for your children). The children are tired, it's past the time they'd normally go to bed, you know they'll wake up early regardless and you'd really like them to get some sleep. However, you're not tired yourself yet and you feel you're due some child-free time. So you put the children to bed, turn out the lights and relax outside on the balcony with a drink and a game of cards* (*replace with your game of choice). After an hour or so, you creep back in the room. The kids are already asleep and you retire for the night yourself. 

Now picture this scene. It's November and you're staying in a hotel in the UK. You've had dinner and probably not gone for a walk as it's too cold. It's past the children's bedtimes and you're looking forward to child-free time, so you put the children to bed, turn out the lights and... ah. Herein lies the problem. You haven't got a balcony. And even if you had, there's no way you'd want to go and sit outside on it in the UK in winter (or, let's be honest, in the UK on many nights except unusually warm summer ones). 

So where do you go? What do you do? A couple of friends have jokingly asked just how loudly we play cards. All I can say is their children must be a whole lot more tolerant than ours if they could sit and play cards in the same room as their sleeping children! Our kids are pretty good at going to sleep, but they wouldn't be able to get to sleep if the light was on (even dimly), they could hear us talking (even quietly) and/or they basically knew we were awake and still in the same room as them. To be fair, neither would I. I need dark and I need quiet. How can I expect the kids to sleep in conditions I wouldn't be able to sleep in myself? 

I also find it really hard to sleep myself if I know the kids are still awake. If I tried to go to bed at the same time as the kids, it would not be a success. There's something about knowing they're awake that keeps me awake. I hear them sighing and fidgeting as they try to get to sleep, struggling themselves because they know we're awake in the same room. The end result is a pretty bad night's sleep all round. (Except for Lee. He can fall asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow regardless. Lucky sod.)

So what can you do? When you want your children to go to bed but you don't want to go to bed yourself, where can you go? The answer, of course, is the bathroom. Yes, I know. It's not comfortable, it's not pleasant, it's really not where you want to spend your evenings on holiday. But it is somewhere you can sit, albeit somewhat uncomfortably, and chat - yes, or play cards - with a drink until the kids are asleep and you're ready to turn in yourselves. If the bathroom's big enough, we bring in a chair from the bedroom and sometimes, if we're really lucky, a small table. We take it in turns to be the (un)lucky one who gets to sit on the toilet. If we're unlucky and there's no room for a chair, one or both of us will sit in the bath. It's not ideal but, for us, it solves a problem and works as a compromise. 

This is one reason I like going abroad on holiday - sunnier climes = balconies = much more pleasant evenings. Camping is fine, even in the UK - if we're in a tent, there's a reasonable chance the weather's also warm enough for us to sit outside in the evenings. Even if not, the children have separate 'bedrooms' from us inside the tent, which isn't brilliant but is better than the hotel room scenario. Hiring a cottage, chalet or apartment is usually our choice for this country - who needs a bathroom or a balcony when you have a whole lounge or another bedroom to relax in? But on short breaks or as a stopover on a longer journey, hotels are generally unavoidable - and locating a family room that has a separate bedroom for the children is either impossible or far too expensive. So bathroom cards it is!

Of course, now the children are getting older, a whole new world is starting to open up for us. With Finn now being at secondary school and having a phone, we felt confident enough to leave the boys in the hotel room on our recent break in London, while we sat less than 50m away in the hotel bar. It felt very liberating. We still played cards though.