Photo by 920Wendy

CafeMom TheTravelMama (aka Colleen Lanin) is an expert at traveling with kids, but only because she's had her share of past fiascoes to learn from along the way. Colleen is a travel writer and founder of the Travel Mamas blog, the resource for everything and anything related to traveling with children.

Today the mom of 20 month year old Leo and 4 year old Karissa shares three of her own biggest traveling disasters and how she learned to prevent them the next time she hit the road:

Fiasco #1: Kids Tend to Throw Up

You never know when motion sickness or the stomach flu may strike. During a road trip to an amusement park, my preschooler, Karissa, woke 20 minutes before our destination and announced from the backseat, "I'm gonna throw up!" I whipped around from the passenger seat and frantically searched for any type of vessel. I grabbed a box of Kleenex, ripped the tissue from it, and thrust it beneath her chin, narrowly evading a smelly disaster.

Photo by AshBayGrammy

Yawn. My first grader woke me up at 6:45 a.m. today -- 15 minutes earlier than I normally have to drag him out of bed during the week for school. And he'd be sleeping way longer than that during the week if I let him.

I guess it's payback for the weekdays.

Why, oh, why can't kids sleep later during the weekends?

Enjoy the rest of your weekend. I'm hoping for a nap.

Sleepovers are a normal part of a big kid's social scene. But what age is appropriate for the first sleepover—particularly if you don't know the other child's parents very well?

This was a much debated point this week on CafeMom: An anonymous mom wondered if her 6-year-old daughter was too young to have a friend from school sleepover; she was particularly concerned because she had never met the friend's parents...

Photo from Mazzali

Came across these beautiful rooms for teenagers, alá the sustainable and eco-friendly Italian furniture company Mazzali, and I lived with these pretty bedrooms IN MY MIND for a little while.

Sleep apnea—when a child pauses in breathing during sleep—can be terrifying, as some CafeMoms have experienced firsthand.

Now, a new study suggests that children who are both overweight and wet the bed at night may have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).

Photo by superpowers1279

Many CafeMoms think that opposite sex toddlers sharing a bedroom is no big deal, but the room is split on whether opposite sex teen siblings should share quarters. Some states even have laws that prohibit it.

But here's a new kid sleeping question that popped up in Advice for Moms -- same sex siblings sleeping in the same bed.

jen_wikstrom's 5 and 6 year old sons share a room, and they always end up sleeping in the same bed, even though they each have their own. They are not foster children (there are laws governing those types of sleeping arrangements). She wants to know if it's okay to move the bed out of the room and let the boys sleep on the one bed, since they always end up there anyway.

Photo from D*S

Love this red, white, and blue themed big boy's room — although with a few slightly more feminine accents, it could easily work as a girl's room too. Love that.

Photo by The-Autism-Mom

We just had a breakthrough parenting moment in our house.

My 6 year old can put himself to bed. The other night he put on his pajamas, brushed his teeth, "read" a book, and put himself into bed.

I am in complete amazement at my kid's independence.

Photo by SuperPickle

The bedtime routine has had its ups and downs around our house.

In fact, we're just getting past the long months of our youngest getting out of bed a hundred times to cry, "But I wanna be with yooouu," which followed the long months of our oldest getting up fifty times to say, "But Mom, I just have one more question."

Things seem to be a little smoother this month (knocking wood furiously), and our bedtime rituals even have some glowing moments, positive ones that I hope will be the ones my boys remember with sweet wistfulness.

New research suggests a link between bedtimes and teen depression. The study finds that teens who stay up past midnight on weeknights have a higher chance of being depressed or suicidal than teens whose parents enforce an earlier bedtime.