Let Beauty Awake

Port woke me up this morning with his diaper in his hand. 

The boys have been getting up earlier since the time change - it's not as bad as some of my poor friends, but I certainly don't like being woken up before my alarm goes off.  I suppose it is pretty nice when I am greeted with a sweet smiling by and a gentle "good mownin mumma". But when the wake up is an open wet diaper tangled in a pair of pajama bottoms sitting on my chest, it doesn't exactly start my day off right.

I don't care to get up before my alarm either, because it leaves us too much time to get ready in the morning. And if there is downtime I get sleepy. I like to get up and keep moving until we are out the door. But anyway, I suppose it could be worse.

The other night when I was out with my girlies, I recalled a story I never blogged that you might be interested in reading.  It was from our vacation to Arizona a couple of years ago.  If you are new around here or don't remember, Hubby and I took the boys on a 2 week long trip to Flagstaff for our annual family vacation with the inlaws.  Kiddo was almost 4 and Port was only 4 months old.  I blogged the first few days of the trip but I am pretty sure I never finished it out. {on a side note, I titled almost all of them with the songs from Ralph Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel. I thought it was pretty brilliant... ;-) }

To refresh your memory (or get you up to speed), we drove to Arizona, stayed in Flagstaff for about a week and then drove back.  We were packed into our little CRV and towed a trailer with the stuff that didn't fit in the car.  Port was still very new, and thankfully sleepy, and I was pumping 8xs a day to feed him. On the drive there and back, we traveled pretty unplanned; that is, we didn't really reserve hotel rooms or anything along the way. We basically landed where we did, found a hotel and would stay the night. We stayed in a few dumps and a few pretty cool places along the way. 

On the way back home we were in New Mexico (I think) and had come to the point that we were ready to stop for the night. We started looking for a hotel and it just happened to be time for me to pump again. I had no problem pumping in the car, but since we were so close to stopping I decided to hold off until we found a place to stay.  We found a seemingly ok Motel 6 (they are always a crap shoot - sometimes decent, sometimes awful) and decided it had the best rate that we were going to find in that area. Being the end of the trip, we were a little tapped out financially and really wanted to save some money. So we stopped, paid for the room and then towed the kids up to our room. As we walked through the hotel grounds, I was disturbed by one, the sheer volume of people staying there, and two, the overwhelming smell of pot coming from several of the rooms.

uh huh

We went in our room and it became very clear that we would never be comfortable there; with all of the loud ruckus in the pool and the doorways of other rooms, there was no way we could rest. So, Hubby went back down to get us out of the room (and get our money back) and we decided to try the Motel 8 across the street. It looked pretty nice; it had much newer construction and a very tall fence around the perimeter of the property.  The lobby looked like something out of a 5 star luxury hotel and when we walked into the room - AMAZING! It was so beautiful! I was so relieved to be somewhere comfortable, quiet and nice!

The room itself was set up in a pretty unusual way. When you walked in the door, the bathroom with toilet and shower was to the right. Walking in lead you straight through the vanity area; when walking in and opening the door to the right, there was a huge 6+ foot wide mirror on the left.  Looking in the mirror from the door you could see the bed room portion of the room in the reflection.  So you walk in, are immediately in the vanity area and then walk through to the bedroom. The beds were on the right, tv on the left and sitting area at the far end of the room next to a big window.

So if you followed that - that was the general layout of the room. Basically one big rectangle with the bathroom tucked off behind the front door.

We got the boys settled inside watching cartoons and since I was about to explode, I set myself up to pump while Hubby went back out to the car to get the rest of our things. I set up on the bed and did my thing.  And being that it was just my family, I didn't really care and I was so tired, I didn't bother with covering anything up (you know modesty flies all out the window when you become a mom; especially the second time around).  So the boys were watching TV and I was pumping and all was right with the world. After a few minutes I hear a key card in the door and it begins to open. I say to Hubby (who is coming in the door), "so did you get everything ok?"

I looked into the vanity area to the mirror which showed me a view of the door.  It cracked open and a head popped in and a man with a big smile on his face saw me...

and his expression immediately changed to horror.

As did mine, because the man was not my husband.

As I scrambled for something to cover myself, he mumbled a hasty, "oh my God I am so sorry!" and scurried out the door. I can only imagine what he thought I was doing, hooked up to some sort of medieval torture device.

I was too tired to be terribly alarmed. I figured it was the cleaning crew or something with the wrong room, and I was pretty sure they'd walked in on much worse.  But then, the phone rang. I answered it and the  concierge was on the other end. 

"WHO ARE YOU and WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THIS ROOM!?!?" the voice yelled at me. I calmly gave her my name and told her we just checked in a minute ago. I asked her what the problem was. She replied that someone else was assigned to that room and she gave it to us by mistake and that her horrified guest had just walked in on me. She realized she had messed up and quickly got off the phone with me without so much as an apology.

I wonder how long that poor man had nightmares...

Until,
D :)