Julie Jay: A hotel break can feel more like a breakdown when you have a toddler

I vow not to stay in a hotel room again until one or both of the kids is booking it on his company credit card. Picture: iStock 

I’M NOT 100% sure people who design hotel rooms have ever met a child. 

As much as a hotel break sounds relaxing on paper, anyone who is in the throes of the toddler stage will tell you it is essentially a 2026 version of the iconic ’90s game show Crystal Maze where, in order to progress to the next level, you had to pass a series of mental and physical challenges. 

If things weren’t going well, contestants were “locked into a cell”, which is interchangeable with being locked into a hotel room, except in the case of the latter the experience is made even worse because you are in the company of small people, and there is always a kettle within reach.

We stayed in a hotel as a family this week, and the staff were wonderful, fabulous, 10/10, but anyone with small children knows a weekend away with small children is basically a hostage situation, only with nicer tea and coffee facilities, facilities to be used at your own peril.

Yes, just to have parents awake and fretting about midnight scalds, every hotel room ever designed has handily placed the kettle to ensure nobody gets a wink of sleep. But it’s not just the kettle that poses an eternal hazard in these hotel rooms.

Everything is within easy reach, such as the light switches. They are turned on and off with such speed that it feels like I’m in a Berlin nightclub, only at least in a Berlin nightclub there might be some chance of sleep.

The phone is also a complete nightmare. On three separate occasions, I have to apologise to reception that, no, we don’t need assistance, despite very much needing it, as I know that no matter how obliging this woman is, she can’t procure the one teddy I left in Dingle before nightfall.

At the risk of sounding like a bag of humbug, another problem with a hotel room is that we are all together. There is nowhere to escape; the only semblance is a quick jaunt to the bathroom and, even at that, you need to move with care. 

A hotel toilet flush is the plumbing equivalent of Niagara Falls — loud and obnoxious, like some visiting rugby fans when descending upon the streets of Dublin for a Six Nations game.

But, as previously mentioned, the lighting is my major bone of contention in hotel rooms. At home, I have a clinical aversion to turning on the big light, preferring the friendlier hues of low-watt lamps. 

In a hotel room, however, it’s either giving ‘I’m trapped in the boot of the car’ levels of darkness or surgical levels of bright UV glare.

Sleeping dragons

Eventually, at half an hour after midnight, the five-year-old goes to sleep, and I will confess at this stage I have already given up and left my husband, who has been enjoying a lot of solo travel with work recently, to deal with our toddler, who is running on high energy and enough rice cakes to keep the Vietnamese export industry afloat for the coming quarter.

His entertaining antics include trundling around in daddy’s shoes (always a comedy classic, to be fair) and subjecting us all to an eclectic a cappella playlist consisting of one song and one song only: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Instead of encouraging him, I lie, stony-faced, staring at the wall, the only giveaway indicating I am still awake consisting of the occasional self-soothing rocking I do back and forth.

I vow not to stay in a hotel room again until one or both of the kids is booking it on his company credit card.

When the Twinkles die out, I know he’s officially out for the count. The husband whispers that he has fallen asleep on the floor while eating a cracker.

I offer a vague ‘OK’, fearing that more than one-word answers will rouse the sleeping dragons, and we just can’t go through this again, having already gone through about three stages of grief in getting them asleep in the first place.

The next day and night

The next morning, I survey the debris and the story checks out: we have a trail of crackers and discarded milk packets, which suggests the baby was partying hard before eventually conking out, having left daddy for dead based on how comatose he is in the bed.

I decide to cut the husband some slack, given that he was the last man standing, and accompany my five-year-old down for breakfast, where he lets me help him with his activity book.

While sipping my flat white, I daydream of a time when I will have two boys going to bed at a reasonable hour and keeping me company at breakfast the next day. That the current toddler carnage won’t last forever. 

However, when I return to the room to find daddy and baby up and about and looking for hugs, I have a moment of wanting to keep him like this forever, late nights and all.

Our second night in the hotel is a little more civilised than the night before, with both kids asleep for 11 or, as they say in Spain, dinner time.

As I eat crisps under the duvet like a criminal, I make a promise to myself to never do this again. This promise lasts for less than 24 hours, as the following day I book us into another hotel for a break towards the end of the summer. 

Because, as much as hotel rooms aren’t conducive to small children, the breakfast buffet alone makes the late nights and forgotten key cards worth every moment. I have the handbag stuffed with tiny pastries to prove it.