Better Than a Hotel

Over President's Day weekend, the reason we were in the Twin Cities (see: Bristol Margaret Meets Grandma Margaret), was to attend a wedding reception (a whole 'nother post in and of itself). While the thoughts of pretty dresses, flowers, dinner, and dancing was lovely, the thought of sleeping in a hotel room with 7 people, including a four month old baby, was the opposite of lovely. And paying for two rooms so we could spread out a little was even less so. Fortunately for us, La Casa Gustafson was open for business. One of my cousins and his family graciously opened their home to us and it was, as the title of the post says, better than a hotel!

First of all, it was just plain fun to hang out with cousins- old and young. My cousin and his wife have four kids that range from 10 or 11ish down to 4. In fact, Elliot and Fletcher are only a couple of months apart and so are Leah and Elana.  Bo and Emmet have a more significant age gap, but their mutual love of video games totally filled the gap. Whether she liked it or not, Bristol was in the arms of Jazmina or Elana pretty much the whole weekend. And Grier ended up kind of settling on Kenai (the 14 year old black lab) as her best pal.
 

The Smother Sisters. The only thing that could have made this picture more complete was if Jazmina was in it. Poor Bristol was a good sport, most of the time.

 

At least the video games on the Kinect are active, right?

I wish I would have gotten a picture of Grier with Kenai. This dog can barely move (Bill had to carry her back up the stairs after she followed us to the basement), much less be a threat to a two year old as spry as Grier, but when we first got there, she was scared out of her wits. By the time we left, every time she'd find a dog toy somewhere in the house, she'd go looking for the "woof" to return it.

I think anyone with small children will agree, the worst part of staying in a hotel room with little ones is that when it's time for the kids to go to bed, the lights have to be off and everyone pretty much has to go to bed. And in the morning, when the first person gets up to go to the bathroom at 6am (if you're lucky, it's at least 6am), one parent has to rush out of bed as quickly as possible to hustle that kid into the hallway and down to the continental breakfast where they will remain until the other parent shows up with the rest of the kids. Which, even after all that effort, will probably be about ten minutes later because who are we kidding? Once one person is up, it's game over.

This is not true when you stay in the 4,000 square foot house of cousins. Children can be tucked into their sleeping bags in the basement and grown-ups can sit in front of the fireplace upstairs to enjoy a pleasant conversation until the ultra-late hour of 11pm, when they're too tired to talk anymore anyway. At that time, they can retire to the bedroom with a door that is next to the room where their children are sleeping. In the morning, people can wake up one by one and go somewhere in the house where there are no sleeping people. They can play or talk there until everyone else is awake.

Movie Night

 

Erin's incredible Imaginext Smurf collection, complete with Gargamel's castle, from when she was a kid.

Hopefully we didn't wear out our welcome because our kids had a blast, I totally loved getting to hang out with my cousin and his wife as adults and fellow parents of young kids (they were in college at Augustana when I was in middle school, so we didn't have a lot in common back then), and it was so relaxing and pleasant to enjoy meals together, have toys and space for the kids to be kids, and honestly, to have more than one bathroom. Hopefully they'll have us back!