Home Sweet Home... I Mean Hotels.

As most of you know, Travis is a professional athlete and traveling is a constant for us.. in season or out of season! During season, we move to a new city and state every 4 days (give or take). In off-season, we visit family and friends every few weeks as we unintentionally neglect one another during season. Home, in this life-style, has to be each other: Travis, little pumpkin-butt Brezzy, our growing pea, and Panda girl.

For many, home is a certain something. Home may mean a certain town or landmark, home may be a momma’s meatloaf and movie night, home may be Suzie’s ball games on Saturday, relaxing, and church on Sunday. For some, home may be the scent of grandma’s apple pie candle or the sound of the dog barking when you pull in the drive way. Home, often times, is something familiar, that makes us feel safe, secure, and at peace. One of my favorite songs that describes an idea of home is What I Love about Sunday: " That's what I love about Sunday. Sing along as the choir sways. Every verse of amazing grace. And then we shake the preacher's hand. Go home into your blue jeans Have some chicken and some baked beans. Pick a backyard football team. Not do much of anything..." We used to envy those who had this sense of home like this! So, I had to get creative moving into season #2.

I started thinking about how to make things familiar. I felt very strongly that both Travis and my babies deserved things that would make them feel like we are settled and where we are supposed to be for the evening, for our stays. I thought long and hard about things that could make that familiar feeling no matter where we are and here are the things that have settled us in, each place we go and that we recommend:

1. White Barn Wallflower

Each hotel room we stay in, will now always smell like warm vanilla spice. For packing purposes, the little wall plug takes up relatively no space. As you may know, not all hotels smell the best so we help that problem as well! This little wall flower has made a huge difference in the feeling of “home.” I have to admit, it was also fun just picking out the scent. We went with Cinnamon Spiced Vanilla! We don’t get to pick out furniture or paint colors like a normal family so we were just thankful to be able to pick out something that we could take with us wherever we go. It smells absolutely heavenly and Bed Bath and Beyond has lots of sales on all kinds of scents that may work for your family!

2. Routines

Routines, in my opinion, are what create a sense of security. Although, we are flexible with our new routines (that's a must in the baseball life), we try our best to make these apart of every trip so that way we can feel that bit of normalcy. Some of our routines we have added/our adding include the following:

Bath time. Almost all hotels have at least a bath in common and we LOVE and recommend Lush bath bombs. (We love bath bombs so much we thought we were starting a bath bomb business at one point). We also highly recommend bath times together in general. You can’t have your phone or other distractions in a bath, it’s naturally intimate, and it’s just flat out relaxing in preparation for a good night’s sleep. Of course, some hotels have tubs that don’t accommodate a large male athlete, but we do our best!

Reading time at bed time. Travis and I do bible plans together. We really love the bible app which I've mentioned in some other posts. Also, we are just now beginning a routine of reading to Brezzy. Some of her favorite books are Rumble in the Jungle, Commotion in the Ocean, and The Little Engine Who Could (this was my favorite book and my grandmother kept mine so I could pass it down to Brezzy).

Breakfast. Our particular schedule allows for us to consistently enjoy breakfast together. We strongly recommend that one meal be made consistent no matter where you are. We make sure to aim for hotels with complementary breakfast so we can stick to this.. and also save money! We filter "complimentary breakfast" on hotels.com (which we love as well to earn free nights) and make that a must. If we get a bit tired of the common options offered at the hotel, we try to pack some of our breakfast favorites or find a local Ihop (I recommend the pablano omlete. Highly recommend.)

3. One item (or a few) that will personalize your stay. We bring one framed, family photo that sits on the night stand in our hotel. This simple item is just a little something that we can look over at and it makes us smile, happy, and we are reminded of the real idea of home again… EACH OTHER 😊

While my idea of home is complete with our precious little girl and Travis alone, it never hurts to have some version of security blankets that can tag along. We are finding what works for us and finding what makes us feel a little more cozy. Hotels, despite being at 4 different ones already this month, can feel homey too!