We went on a vacation in Italy and I decided to do one big post, since the days were pretty repetitive. We left Monday midday, since we couldn’t check in until about 3pm. We had only about 30 minutes of bad traffic, and the rest was fine. Michael was always anticipating lots of traffic and I kept insisting that it was going to be ok, and it was. We got to Val Gardena in about 3 hours, I was kind of amazed that it wasn’t longer.

The hotel that we stayed at (Cavallino Bianco) was awesome! It was our first Kinderhotel stay and I think we chose the best place. It is located right across from the Seiser Alm lift. The views were amazing and they had lots of things for the kids to do.

Our days consisted of swimming in one of their many pools. Amazingly, we can still squeeze them into last year’s bathing suits. I guess their butts didn’t grow much since then. They had a splash pool that had 3 depths that was just perfect for the boys. One was at their ankles, the next was at their knees, then the deepest was at their butt. Rowan liked going in and out of the pool, he was too funny. Elijah slipped a couple of times and got a mouth full of water here and there, but his favorite were the big pools. He liked it when we put him on an edge, and we would count 1, 2, and on 3 he would scoot off the edge and into the water, into our arms. He loved that and wanted to do it over and over.

We also made sure not to miss any meals. Everything is all inclusive, so we tried to get the most for our money. There was breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner. The food was awesome! The dinners were gourmet and not always to my taste, but at least I felt like it was “free” so I tried everything. They had high chairs all around and bibs for the boys and for dinner, they had our table all set up for us. We decided not to bring the boys to dinner with us since it clashed with their sleep time and we could have it “low stress”. On the last night we did go ahead and bring them and I think they did pretty good. I’m sure all the wait staff was glad to see us go because we always left a mess behind us. The bread was awesome, I loved their baguettes!

There was babysitting also included but the boys didn’t do too well. We thought we could just drop them off and we could go do a climb or something, but the boys had other plans. At first, they could only stand it for 2 hours, and gradually it became more, so by the end, they stayed in for about 5 hours. If we stayed another week, we could’ve gone out more. The women who watched them were great, very energetic even though they watched so many kids. The problem was that the boys either need to have a familiar place or familiar people, they don’t do well when there’s neither. They had a great play area with lots of toys and they even had a couple of goats that the boys liked to visit.

We also made it up to the Seiser Alm, but because of poor planning, we went to late and everything was shutting down. The boys did get to play on the slide, this one actually had an easy way to get up it so they could do it over and over and over. They learned how to keep their body up while going down. Before, Rowan would throw his weight back and hit his head.

Michael also got in a day of climbing. It was hard for me because I had to take the boys down for breakfast, lunch and snack by myself. Watching two babies is pretty hard, especially since the high chairs didn’t have belts to strap them down. I don’t know why they didn’t. But I managed. He was going to take another day, but he had a really full day and decided not to. I agreed!

Other than that, we went into the town a little, did some Christmas shopping, and enjoyed it. In the evenings, the stores opened from 9 - 10:30!!! We were flabbergasted! We’re so used to the 8pm shutdown that it was a nice change.

We were hoping to get to see our friend, Daniel, but due to his hectic schedule and us not able to really leave the hotel, we didn’t get a chance. Next time!

Overall, even though we didn’t get to do adult stuff, the hotel was absolutely great and the boys had a lot of fun. We hope to return next year where they have an even “funner” program for older kids.