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Adventures in Couch Surfing with Kids

This holiday, my family stayed with friends on vacation and earned more than just some extra cash in our travel fund. The benefits of coming to stay.

My text to a friend read, 'Couch-surfing with my little girls in Nor Cal this week. Happy New Year!' Only when reading it in type did it occur to me how ridiculous it sounded. Coming up to my old college town to stay with friends and use their living rooms as a home base for adventures was something I did in my 20s. It was a pre-kid way of life, right?

Well I guess I didn’t get that memo. Because here I was, well into my 30s, and I’ve just spent the week between Christmas and New Years staying with friends along with my small girls, ages 5 and 2.

To some, it would seem absurd, torturous and perhaps downright rude to invade your friends’ homes with children and sleeping bags in tow, roll away bags big enough for the week. But I have phenomenally open-hearted friends and, I hope, fairly well-behaved kids.

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Some parents would also say they just can’t disrupt their young children’s sleep as much as this type of trip would. At a certain time in my kids’ lives, I might have agreed. But armed with a battery-operated white noise machine and familiar baby blankets, my girls were no more underslept than any other trip — which means they were, but not horribly.

Our couch surfing trip came with some fun benefits, too. Obviously the price-tag allowed us to do much more than if we’d been giving our money to a hotel (our only alternative since our camping gear isn’t great for all-weather cold).

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Here’s some of the other things we gained by camping indoors with friends this holiday:

•We split up our week between two households. Because we were staying in close quarters with another whole family in each location, I got many opportunities to stress behavior from my children that was extra respectful and carried minimal footprint. “Tuck your bag under the futon after you’re done with it please, remove your wet socks from the bathroom floor right away, and please, please remember your sweet and indoor voice for all of our sakes, Sweetie.”

•Every house has different rules. Can we jump on the couch, flush the toilet paper? Some places are too close to neighbors to be loud in the yard, others insist on remembering to remove your shoes before entering. Learning about how and why families operate the way they do at home is educational and broadening to all of us.

•Similarly, every family has different ways of living. Do they pray before dinner, compost food scraps? Are they early risers one and all? I value exposure to different cultures for my children, even those subtle differences within each culture that is a family unit. I especially appreciated learning greener ways of doing things on this trip. One set of friends stored old plastic bags in a way that made them way more usable than our disorganized mess at home. Too, one family keeps chickens so their 12-year-old’s job was to gather eggs every morning for our breakfast. Our 5-year-old loved tagging along on this chore and we are greatly inspired to try the same back at our place.

Of course, sleeping in the living room isn’t all sunshine and roses; the biggest sacrifice probably being the lack of privacy for things like sleep and other bodily functions. But it really is a learning experience. And you can sort of look at it as the recycling of the accommodations world. Who needs a brand new, constantly scrubbed and re-stocked room to stay, when this family over here has a place already in use anyway? In the process you just might get some new perspectives on the grand old theme of how we live — as well as a flock chickens, if you’re not careful.

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