Hotel-School

DH's every-other-week travel is hard on all of us. Sleep is poor, behavior is less-than-ideal, and grumpiness abounds on the weeks that we are separated. (And that's just me...)

This week, we are trying something different. His class is in Kansas City, MO... just a four-hour drive from our home... and we've tagged along. I packed our books, and we've settled into a suite-style hotel room.

Yesterday afternoon, while DH set up his for his class, we hiked through a nature preserve. We found garter snakes, spiders with their prey in webs, multiple types of beetles, a walking stick bug, lots of signs of early fall. It was a beautiful, breezy day, and after a morning in the car, we all relished the chance to stretch, run, explore.

This morning, we got up early to drop DH at the office. Then, after breakfast in the hotel lobby, we came back up to the room to start our day. LilBro worked puzzles and played with cars as Princess and I worked through her subjects. BigBro sat at the desk to complete his independent work.

We are getting close to finishing up our book work for the day. I sit here with a pile of brochures... what adventure will we seek out this afternoon?

If this week is a success, if we manage to stay (more-or-less) on track with our school work, and if we don't drive DH crazy in the hotel room, this could become part of our family routine... at least for those trips within a reasonable driving distance. As I said to DH last night, this is about keeping our family together, not about "vacations" or "sight-seeing." If we get out and about, explore and see new things, all the better. But if all we do is school work, splash in the hotel pool, and spend our evenings as a family, that's enough for me.