We will be renting out a house here in Japan and the only one we could find that will work for our needs was not yet completed. So we were waiting in the Navy Lodge which is pretty much the base hotel, but after 90 days past and the house move in date got pushed back to the end of January we had to move off base to wait. It is crazy but we actually got used to living in the hotel for the time while we were there. Yes, it was crazy hard to live in a hotel and share one bedroom with five kids for three months. We thought we were going to stay longer so the last week we were able to move to a two bedroom room. It would have been nice to know that existed three months prior. But we didn't know about it until just before we left so we got to spend our first few months in Japan nice and close to one another.
There were a few things we enjoyed about hotel life. The first was the great view. Below is a picture of the heavy lift. It is basically one boat that sunk down into the water so the other boat could get on top of it to be carried.
The kids loved the free breakfast and I liked not making them breakfast.
After the first month I stopped eating most of it and switched to just a hard boiled egg or some cereal, you can only have so many donuts without gaining weight. The kids also needed to have limits put upon what they could eat.
Breakfast was also handy when the kids were getting out of line in the hotel. "What you were jumping across the beds again when you were supposed to be sleeping? No donuts for breakfast tomorrow." Don't worry I still let them have the eggs or fruit or plain oatmeal when they were in trouble. Just no donuts, yogurt, flavored oatmeal, bagels, muffins, or apple juice, you know all the good stuff.
There were two tv's in the eating area and the kids loved watching cartoons while they ate. I found it made them eat really really slow.
The yogurt was always an issue. The kids learned early on that once in a while one in the very back would be frozen and to them was pretty much ice cream that takes forever to eat. So everyday you could see them rushing to the little fridge and fighting over who got to reach in the back first. Most of them couldn't reach the top back and it wasn't uncommon for Leon to climb up on the counter and for yogurts to be falling out on the floor. Or for them to just be arguing and fighting about who got which one.
Scarlett even wrote the employees a thank you note for cleaning our rooms and for the yummy breakfast.
We stayed the full 90 days and had accumulated quite a bit of stuff. A few friends let us load up their vans so we didn't have to make so many trips to the new place, which is about 30 minutes away. It was very nice of them and we were able to do it much quicker than I thought we would.
I will also miss the room cleaning. It was so nice to have someone make our beds and vacuum for and I love love loved not ever having to empty the garbage. It was also great to do three loads of laundry at once! That totally made my life easier.
Overall we really did need some more space and I am glad to be in a bigger place. Calista can finally take a nap. Before we did it I would have never thought we would be able to live in a hotel room for 90 days and I'm glad it is over.
