Family rooms - do they work or will it be a sleepless nightmare for everyone?

[BasementBear]

We have to be in Cambridge early on Sunday morning and are considering making a weekend of it, going up Saturday and staying overnight.

Have 2 DS's - 4.5 and 6 who would have to share a sofa bed in a travel lodge type family room, with double bed for us.

Will we all end up getting no sleep? Has anyone had experience of this and what would you advise please??!!

If its Travelodge they usually have a sofa with a roll out bed underneath, so in effect 2 single beds. We usually re-arrange the room and move sofas etc, put any extra blankets in the room around the windows to block out light etc.

We have on the odd occasion waited until the dc fell asleep and then taken books/newspapers into the bathroom with one sitting on the chair provided in the room and the other sitting on the toilet!

We usually keep our two up for as long as possible, so they are very tired and you have more chance of them dropping off quickly.

From memory most of Cambridge Travelodges are on busy motorways.

There is a Holiday Inn Express though which provides breakfast in the cost, but your dsses would need to share a double sofa bed and the rooms are generally smaller than Travelodges.

There may be a Premier Inn/Lodge but I am not sure

It depends on your children: what their usual routines are and how heavily they sleep.

We share rooms all the time: holidays, hotels, travel lodges, YHAs. When they were younger dh would take ds1 off to read a book or do an activity in a bar or something, whilst ds2 went to sleep. Then bring him back when he was down.

Now (they are 9 and 10) we usually all just read and drop off when we're ready. (I'm usually first or second asleep!)

I have never put my two together in a bed though, but Travel Lodges and Premier Inns have a sofa bed and a pull-out bed in family rooms.

It works fine for us all sharing a room now (Dc are 8, 6, 4). It was a fairly sleep-deprived experience sharing when they were toddlers.

We've done this before, and it's worked for us.

Guess it does depend on your children.

Thanks everyone, we will just have to go for it and hope for the best, I am expecting them to stay up later than usual and will just do my utmost to knacker them out during the day!!

Its Ok, but don't expect any nookie.

We stayed in a Travelodge in Cambridge that was near a cinema and bowling complex, just outside the city centre (walkable but ours are older and have longer legs than your two!!). It was quiet but was in the week - probably noisier at the weekend.

We've always found them fine - dp and I take nice bubble bath (take it in turns for a long soak) and plenty of books and then buy a bottle of wine; then we just have a quiet chilling time with dim lights, so the girls can sleep and we have time to relax with our books! We don't speak to each other much after about 10.30pm though when in a family room, I must admit!

Sleepless nightmare ime, sorry! But then I am an exceptionally light sleeper ...

my children snore.

We took dd (4) and dsd (12) to a Travelodge on a weekend away to see Father Christmas in some caves in the Forest of Dean. We wanted the lights off for dd to go to sleep and told dsd that as soon as she was we'd put a side lamp on and play Uno. Cue dsd moaning that dd always gets her own way and it wasn't fair.

We then had a pantomime-style farce with dsd leaping across the room to switch the lights on and as soon as she got back to her bed I'd switch them off. This went on for a while until dh and I both got fed up with her and told her off.

Dsd is angry about this and starts telling dd that Father Christmas isn't real at which point I did the VERY protective mother duck and started yelling at dsd, leapt in between her and dd, held her by the arms and told her to go to bed.

Dsd accuses me of assaulting her, I storm off to the car to calm down leaving dsd leaning out of the hotel window to get a signal on dh's phone so she could ring her mum to tell her what I'd allegedly done.

The two years before that were fine though . And although breakfast was a little frosty, we were all friends again by the end of Sunday.