Fun Times at the Drury Inn

I promise to keep this post shorter than the others. As we traveled down to Oklahoma on Wednesday and Thursday, we broke the trip into shorter sections by staying at the Drury Inn & Suites in far southwest St. Louis. We stay there so often, we ought to get a timeshare there! The staff is great, the hotel is fine, we often get a two-room suite to put the kids down for sleep before we turn in, and they have a hot breakfast and free internet access. It certainly is a nice place to stay when we're on the road.

Yesterday morning, we finished our breakfast and went back upstairs around 7:30 am or so. The kids were still in their PJs, and they started running around the open atrium on the second floor. Our two kids absolutely LOVE to play "got you," and it almost doesn't matter who is chasing them. They often chase each other, which is what they were doing yesterday.

Now, I can appreciate that many people just don't like to hear kids shrieking with delight. For lots of people, the sound might as well be fingernails on a chalkboard. Even for other parents, if it's not your own kids, it can be really annoying to hear other kids' giggles and laughter. So, for those people who called the front desk and complained, I apologize. I'm sorry my kids weren't being better controlled, and that they were having a good time. I know they were being a little loud every so often as they chased each other around the glass walls of the railing. If you were sleeping in on your road trip, I apologize for waking you up at 7:30 in the morning. If you were some of those college kids who were boozing it up the night before and were therefore hungover at that time of day, I'm sure the shrieks sounded like a-bombs going off outside your door, and I apologize for not giving you more time to sleep it off.

To me, there's simply no better sound in the world that hearing the giggles and laughter of little kids who don't know how to use their indoor voices yet. They were expressing pure, unadulterated joy. They haven't learned the lesson of always being in control of their emotions, or of only expressing themselves when society deems it appropriate. They're not quite three years old and 16 months old, so I hope they don't learn those lessons for some time.