Traveling with kids is a fun, but also a mildly stressful experience. The younger your kids are, the harder it is to travel with them. If you’re brave enough to travel with an infant, you are a superhero. That is definitely not for the faint of heart, and parents are always trying to figure out hacks for traveling with babies. And it looks like one mom has cracked the code.
In a TikTok video, she shared her unconventional hack for getting her infant to sleep while on vacation: putting baby’s crib in the shower. Some people think that she’s a genius, and of course, others have concerns.
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Infant travel hacks are super useful if you want them.
TikTok user and mom Chloe Molina shared that when she travels with her husband and 6-month-old son Ezra, they put the baby’s travel crib in the hotel shower. Speaking with People, Molina explained that her unconventional “travel hack” first started during a family trip to Mexico after Ezra “was up all night long,” when his travel crib was close to the couple’s bed at their vacation rental.
The 'hack' may not be typical, but it seems useful.
“They know if you’re two feet away from them so they’re going to constantly wake up and see you sleeping right next to them and want milk,” Molina explained. “Especially if you’re breastfeeding, they can smell your milk, they can smell you.”
In her TikTok, she said Ezra “teases” her and her husband into thinking he’s asleep, adding “he just knows we’re there and he’s gonna wake up all the time.”
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Putting the crib in the shower or bathroom tricks baby into thinking they're in their own room.
Molina told People that she got the tip from her sister-in-law, who is mom to four kids. And while putting the baby in the bathroom seemed like a great idea, space was an issue. “We couldn’t fit the crib in the bathroom. The only place it fit was the shower, so we put the crib into the shower,” she shared. Despite being in the shower, “he slept through the whole night.”
The family has used the bathroom hack four times so far, and “only” when they’re traveling. While it may seem odd, it’s not as if Ezra is aware of what’s happening. “He just knows that it’s a room with a door, with blacked-out darkness. He doesn’t know it’s a bathroom,” Molina explained. She also shared that they’ve put the baby in a closet if family visits their home.
She addressed concerns about having to use the bathroom while the baby is sleeping.
A lot of people had a valid question: What happens when one of the adults has to use the bathroom while baby is sleeping? Molina had a solution for that, too.
“We would take the shower curtain and just slightly pull it so it could cover his crib and he can’t see us use the bathroom — and then once we were done, we would open the curtain back up,” she explained. “Then we would leave … and he didn’t wake up at all.”
Of course, this could be more complicated if the room doesn’t have a shower curtain that is opaque, but Molina didn’t seem concerned.
People had a lot of mixed reactions.
Naturally, people had a lot of thoughts about Molina’s travel hack. While some people called the idea “cute” and admitted that they had done something similar during their own travels, others expressed concerns about something going wrong or something happening in the hotel room.
“Personally with the strong cleaning agents that hotel room bathrooms are cleaned with that is the LAST place I would be putting my baby of a night breathing that air plus likely mould,” one comment reads.
“Nah I would be terrified it would turn on,” another added.
“I’d be too worried about water pipe would burst in the middle of the night,” someone else shared.
