My favorite travel tip

Traveling with little ones can be challenging, especially keeping them on their sleep schedules. Nothing can ruin a vacation more than a cranky, underslept kiddo. I’m here to offer my favorite, low-cost travel accessory to help optimize your child’s sleep space no matter where you are traveling - black trash bags! Totally not glamorous, I know, but totally useful.

Unless you’re sleeping in a hotel, whose rooms usually have black-out curtains on each window, you cannot guarantee that your child’s sleep space at your airbnb or at Grandma and Grandpa’s will be dark enough to keep them sleeping through the night and not waking with the sun at 5:30am! And what about during those long summer days when the sun shines until 8pm? In come the trash bags! With a roll of masking tape you can easily tape as many as you need to cover the windows to ensure a nice dark room, perfect for keeping your little one sound asleep.

bring out the trash bags and block out the light!

Four years ago my parents rented a house in the Berkshires for a weeklong family vacation. We excitedly packed up half our house and then realized - what about blackout curtains? Black trash bags to the rescue! We bought a new box and threw them in our overstuffed trunk. As we settled into our vacation house we looked around at the awesome top floor room with ensuite bathroom we had chosen and would be sharing with our baby - and realized the room had SEVEN enormous windows with no more than a gauzy curtain to block the light. My amazing husband spent an hour scaling the walls to tape up every single trash bag we had brought to cover the windows until the room was as dark as a cave.

At the end of the vacation we took down the bags and shoved them in a small duffel. Four years later that same duffel, with the same bags (some covered with tape) comes with us each time we travel.