We were able to find some pretty cheap hotel rooms in St. George for our stay over spring break. I was worried that rooms would fill up fast because of spring break, but I think a lot of other school districts in the area had their spring breaks at different times. We initially looked into going to the Moab area to visit Arches National Park and the Canyonlands National Park, but apparently the week before Easter each year there is a big Jeep/4-wheel drive convention there and things were already booked and were probably super busy at both parks during that time.
The hotel we ended up staying at ended up not being quite as nice or as spacious as they showed on the hotel website, but for the price they were decent. Each of the rooms had a kitchen/living room area with a small kitchen table, small couch, full-sized fridge and a small stove/oven. It helped out with our food bill because we were able to bring and buy a few lunch items that we could then refrigerate. The hotel also offered a free continental breakfast between 7-9 each morning. The big hit at the breakfast was the two waffle makers! They also had a couple of cereals to choose from and bread for making toast. For drinks they offered orange juice, milk and another type of fruit drink. One morning they also had some mini blueberry muffins. Luke and I were usually the first ones up and ready each morning so we would head down to the breakfast room and bring some food back to our room and then help the other kids when they were ready. Our last morning there the breakfast room was super busy with a super long line for the waffle makers so most of us just had cereal and some of the mini muffins.
Unfortunately our 2 hotel rooms were not next to each other (my parents' room was the floor above ours and one room over). It worked out okay though because we weren't too far from the stairs. We decided to have Blondie and Kitty stay in the room with my parents and then M&M and Kay shared a bed in our room with Luke in a sleeping bag on the floor and MJ on our Pack-N-Play mat and some blankets, also on the floor. It felt weird having the A/C running all night long, but it was necessary to keep the room at a comfortable temperature.
The hotel we stayed at had an indoor pool and that was all the kids could talk about leading up to our trip. The first thing that Luke wanted to do when we got to the hotel Wednesday night was go swimming. I even heard him say at one point, "Why else would we be staying at a hotel with a pool if we weren't going to go swimming?" Well, the real reason for getting the hotel we did was that it was super cheap, not the fact that it had a pool...
We weren't able to go swimming the first night (the pool closed at 10:30 p.m.), but we did manage to take the kids swimming twice while we were there. The first time was Thursday night and then again on Friday afternoon. The first time my dad got into the pool with us to help with the kids, but the second day his ear was bothering him so we were on our own with the kids. And can I just say that keeping an eye on 6 kids in the swimming pool is a full-time job! Thankfully we had enough floaty things to pass around to help with the younger kids and M&M and Luke do pretty good on their own. It also helped that MJ and Kay both loved the water and had a lot of fun in the pool. Since we have come back home Kay has mentioned to me several times that she loves swimming and wants to know when we can go again!
These first few pictures are from the Thursday night swimming. The building the pool was in had very few lights so some of the pictures didn't turn out too well. It was kind of hard to see with only a few lights along the walls.
These last pictures are from Friday afternoon. We tried Kay in the floaty seat on Thursday but she wasn't too crazy about it. When my dad decided not to come with us on Friday I decided to try MJ out in it and she really liked it (or at least tolerated it without fussing the majority of the time). That enabled us to help out more with the three middle girls.
