That One Time We Cruised, part 6: Is It Finally the End?

Wow, you’ve stuck through a lot of description of our cruise! But now, sadly, we are reaching the end. So, here’s a little final miscellany.

1. You know how if you get blackout curtains and turn out all the lights, you still get light filtering in from somewhere? Maybe it’s the light on your powerstrip cord. Maybe a little coming through a slit between or underneath the curtains. Not so when you’re in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night. So dark. So weird. I had lots of funky dreams on the cruise—I think partially because of the utter darkness, partially the oodles of food, and partially the pregnancy.

So, yeah, we probably took about as many
pictures at the Space Center as we did on
the entire rest of the vacation.

2. The service was fantastic. You have the same servers each night at dinner, and you have the same maid (? whatever you call her) the whole time too. They know your names, they try to be as helpful as possible, and they have lovely personalities. Or at least they fake it because they’re getting paid.

3. Coriel is super-duper into mysteries, and there was this fun mystery adventure that you had to go all around the ship to find clues for. Addra really enjoyed it too.

4. We went to the Kennedy Space Center on Friday after we got back into Florida. It was fun and totally worth it. We went to a short lecture and Q&A with a real-life astronaut. Coriel was thrilled. She asked about the requirements for becoming an astronaut and immediately started talking about how she was going to do it. (Most recently she has decided to become the president of the United States instead, but I’m pretty sure that will pass too.) Brice and the girls went on a space shuttle simulator. (I held Koa and didn’t tell the girls that I wasn’t doing it because I was pregnant.) Koa fell asleep in the stroller when I was outside in the blistering heat but then immediately started waking up both times I tried to wander into the cool indoors. So I just sat, melting, in a little shade while he napped. Weird kid. We weren’t sure the Space Center would be worth the cost at first, but it turned out awesome that we went. Plus, it totally counted as homeschooling. Win!

The Wrapup:

So while I started out hating the cruise, by the end we had all had lots of fun. It truly was an enjoyable vacation, and we’re glad we did it. However, it also wasn’t really our vacation style. We don’t really like being on someone else’s schedule, and we prefer having a wider range of options for what to do with our time. Brice and I are used to choosing our own activities when we vacation, and there are usually museums involved. And maybe a chocolate shop. And a used bookstore. And our own quirky adventures.

The separation of family had its pros and cons. We actually really do like being together, even on vacations, but a cruise doesn’t feel like it’s very much about togetherness, so that felt weird. On the other hand, it was lovely to be able to drop the kids off and have some time to ourselves. We had a nice dinner, just the two of us, one night, which wouldn’t happen on a regular vacation. Also, I freely admit that I sometimes need to cut the strings a little more and just trust that the kids are safe and happy elsewhere—so that was some good practice. I think the ideal would have been to have more options where we could all be together—as well as the option of being apart. There was very little that was suited to having us all playing together. In fact, there really wasn’t anything except mealtimes. (The pool had a separate spot for the babies; we weren’t allowed into the kids’ clubs except during a couple of hours here and there; when we went on the spy/mystery adventure around the ship, we just put Koa in the stroller so he wasn’t particularly engaged or active—which gets boring quickly for a little one.)

So did we enjoy it? Yes, we all did. Will we do it again? Probably someday, but we’re not itching for it. There are too many vacation options in the world for us to jump up and down for a cruise again immediately. If we do it again, we will probably wait until all the kids are old enough to be in the kids clubs; I think that would be more fun for them and for us all.

Still, the tenth anniversary trip was a success! Happy anniversary to us!

That One Time We Cruised, part 5: The Diaper Dash

A big event on the cruise is the Jack-Jack Diaper Dash. Very important. Very exciting. If your child is crawling but not yet walking, you can enter him/her into this exciting race. Okay, I know I already said towel-folding was my favorite onboard activity, but I lied. Actually, thinking about it, it’s hard to choose. Towel-folding was fun just for me. The Diaper Dash was fun because I got to watch Koa be adorable. A cookie-baking activity was fun because I got to do it with Coriel. Food was fun because it was, well, food. Et cetera. So, you know, they were all good.

Anyway, back to the Diaper Dash. In Koa’s racing heat, there were three kids. Two of them were barely crawlers, and Koa was the other, so I thought for sure he would win (oh how the mighty are fallen). Brice was with Koa at the starting line, and I was like the carrot on a stick at the finish, trying to entice him to come to me. It started off with a little confusion. Poor babies had no idea what to do with all these strange adults around them cheering and making noise. Finally, though, Koa took a few crawling steps toward me . . . and the crowd went wild! So wild, in fact, that Koa was startled into sitting back on his butt, looking around to see what all the fuss was about.

And that’s about as far as he got. I couldn’t convince him that he wanted to come any farther. Brice and I should have traded places (and I think we eventually did? I can’t remember), but one way or another, it just didn’t work out. In fact, none of the babies really wanted to crawl toward the finish. What should have taken about a minute probably took five or so. No one in our heat even crossed the line. (In the next heat, one baby did, and the first place award was a bib.)

Let me just say, that Diaper Dash was good times.

That One Time We Cruised, part 4: The Beach

No pictures from the actual beach because that would have
necessitated bringing a camera to the beach. Crazy talk.

I read in one of John Gottman’s* books that every couple has about seven “irreconcilable differences”—things that they will just never agree about so they have to learn how to deal with that. I have discovered at least two of ours: 1. Brice’s enjoyment of Radiohead. 2. The one that matters to this blog post: His adoration for the beach.

Happily, though we will never agree on the topic of Radiohead “music” being music, we have adapted quite nicely to these particular differences.** When it comes to beach time, I happily follow along after him, and as long as I am not forced to try to surf or swim through the ocean much, I’m pretty content. (Although I do always manage to get awkwardly placed sunburns.) Plus, he takes me to a lake now and again so I can row in a rowboat—which is my version of watery bliss—so it evens out.

On the day that we docked in Nassau, we gamely gathered our stuffed, tossed on our swimsuits, and headed off to find a beach for a little while. It was scorchingly hot. The kind of hot where you’re not sure if all that water pouring off you is sweat or if your body is just melting. When we finally found a nice little patch of beach, we were all very happy to get into the water. It was lovely and fun, and the girls were ecstatic to be playing in the ocean, finally getting to test their swim lessons against something a little less tame than an indoor pool. Brice, of course, was in heaven. He went up to a big concrete overlook where a number of slightly drunken individuals were taking turns egging one another into jumping off, and he enthusiastically cannonballed down several times.***

After a while, though, we headed back to the ship (melting some more along the way). We knew there was a fancy beach in store for us the next day.

And fancy it was! Castaway Cay’s beaches were the kind of perfect that, in this case, had to have been manmade. As in, they carted in tons of perfect, soft, white sand to make these lovely beaches. At least I assume so. There were no shells, no pebbles, nothing but tiny grains of sand. Pretty sure that’s not natural, even in the awesomest natural beaches on earth.

But that wasn’t a complaint, merely an observation. The beach was absolutely beautiful, and the water was calm enough to hang out and have fun splashing around in with small children. We built some sand “castles” (AKA piles of lump sandy), dug some holes (a perennial beach favorite), and relaxed both in and out of the water. It’s possible that some of us even peed in that lovely cool water because the bathrooms were too far away (too much information?).

I also got to have a fantastic extra experience that Brice bought me as a surprise—hanging out with the stingrays! Ever since watching a giant manta ray swim up against the glass at an aquarium in New Zealand, flapping its wings (wings? what are they called?) so smoothly, I’ve been pretty much enchanted with rays. They’re like the flying carpets of the ocean! How can I not love them? So Brice took all the kids while I got to go feed the stingrays and snorkel around them. It was fantastic.**** So what they do is there’s this floating platform thing with an up and down ramp attached. The stingrays are trained to swim up the ramp and around this semicircle platform to gather food, then swim back down.

While they’re on the platform, all of us who are gathered around it get the chance to try to feed them. Which essentially consists of holding a piece of weird food stuff (like really thick, gross-looking green jello or a piece of slimy fish) sticking up between two fingers with your hand flat on the platform. Then they come along and vacuum it out of your fingers. Seriously—it was like having your hand attacked by a rather bristly animated vacuum. Pretty cool, if you think about it—rays are both carpets and vacuums! I loved it. And then I got to snorkel around for a while, watching the rays swim just beneath me. Lots of them. Ah, it was lovely.

Are the stingrays happy? I don’t know. They seem to lead pretty cooshy lives. They are well-fed and it was very clear that the fellow who was teaching my group about the stingrays loved working with them and loved the stingrays themselves. Sure, they don’t go around and catch their own food, but they also don’t get eaten by sharks or whatever their natural predators are. They seem pretty content, but who knows? I’m very sorry, little stingrays, if you aren’t happy at Castaway Cay, but I sure couldn’t tell.

And that, my friends, was the beach. Stay tuned for the Diaper Dash, the Kennedy Space Center, and the wrapup!

* Marriage therapist extraordinaire, studied extensively in grad school.

** Sing praises for the invention of earphones! Also, fyi, I realize that these are ridiculous “irreconcilable differences.”

*** Don’t worry; this was the express purpose of the overlook, so the water was indeed deep enough and such. Just because the people urging one another to jump were drunk doesn’t mean it wasn’t safe. In this case.

**** Way better than the towel-folding, in case you were remembering that I said the towel class was my favorite activity. I only meant it was my favorite activity on the boat.

That One Time We Cruised, part 3: Activities

For the girls:

The girls loved all the time that they spent at the kids’ clubs. Essentially what you do is drop them off, let them hang out forever, and pick them up . . . eventually! There were games, crafts, cooking (sort of), explorations, and of course the movies. But they didn’t end up watching movies nearly as much as I thought they would (well, at least I don’t think so; I wasn’t there, so I’m not positive). It was weird just dropping them off forever. I imagined that it was a little like public school, which was of course unusual for me. But like I said, they were happy campers.

There were also the requisite character experiences, where you could go and get your picture taken with a princess, Mickey, etc. Buuuut . . . we didn’t. We almost went to one, but then we did something else instead. Plus, it would have required standing in line.

I took the girls to one of the musical productions one night. It was fun to just be with them while Brice took care of the Koa man, and the girls had fun. It was pretty much a musical medley strung together with an outside storyline, but it was enjoyable. Then afterward I took the girls up to see a bit of the Jack Sparrow pirate show, which was good times but also way too overcrowded. PEOPLE! Our favorite part was the fireworks.

For the adults:

We looked at the list of potential activities, and most of them were not things we would enjoy. Lots of lounging and associating with total strangers—not my cup of tea. A few movies, a few productions in the evenings (like the one I went to with the girls and a ventriloquist show that was pretty funny).

On the day we stopped at Castaway Cay (an island essentially owned by Disney—pretty snazzy), Brice did a 5K on the island. He’s so shiny. He seemed to enjoy that quite a bit. (More about the beach in a different blog post.)

My favorite was the towel-folding. Yep, you read that right—towel-folding. Every day our room service attendant (what is the correct term for that these days? I almost called her the maid, but I’m pretty sure that’s not right anymore) would bring us new towels and fold one of them all cute into an animal shape. There was a class on how to do that, so Brice and I went and got to fold monkeys and dinosaurs and such. I thought it was fun and silly.

For Koa:

This is the biggest drawback of going on a cruise with a baby, if you ask me (which you did, since you’re reading this). What in the world do you do with the baby? It turns out there really aren’t that many options.

Option 1: Stick him in the nursery. Which is good, but it also costs extra. It’s one of the few things that isn’t included in the price of the cruise. Plus, unlike with the older kids, it’s not as nice to just drop him and leave him for hours and hours. At least, we didn’t think so. I’m sure that it works great for some, but not so much for us. Still, it was a good option to be used judiciously. OH, plus, they actually got him to nap briefly a few times! How did they manage it? Disney magic, I guess.

Option 2: The pool. There’s a little kiddy splash pad at the pool that Koa and I hung out in for a while. This was fun until he saw his older sister going down a slide in that section and he wanted to do it too. I couldn’t figure out exactly how to make that work, since I was too big to go down with him and he wasn’t quite clear on how to do it himself. So then he was cranky. Plus, having me and Koa in the splash pad meant that we didn’t get to hang out with Brice and the girls in the regular pool. Also plus, I was sunburned by this point, and wearing a swimsuit on my poor sunburned shoulder (just one, if I recall—I’m really bad with sunscreen) was rather uncomfy.

Option 3: Start at the bottom floor and crawl. Koa’s favorite activity on the ship was crawling up the stairs. Normally when we’re somewhere with stairs, there’s only one flight and so at the top we’d have to carry him back down to start all over again. On the ship, there was something like eleven straight floors of stairs that he could just crawl up and up and up. He loved that. Brice, being the awesome man that he is, spent a not insignificant amount of time following Koa up the stairs. We’d drop the girls off at the clubs, I’d head to our room for a little nap (because, hey, pregnancy + motion sickness = need a nap), and Koa would crawl while Brice followed him.

Well, this post has gone on longer than intended, so you’ll have to wait to hear about more exciting stuff—like the Diaper Dash, stingrays, and the beach. Are you totally on the edge of your seat now?

That One Time We Cruised, part 2: The Food

Well, you know that the main thing about going on a cruise is the food, right? And it’s true. At first, I wasn’t overly impressed. Our first lunch on board was right near the end of the lunch time, and things were really crowded (we sat outside directly in the blistering sun because we couldn’t find another spot), and they were starting to put the food away. So again, that first day did not make a great impression.

However.

The rest of the trip was fantastic when it came to food. In the first place, most of it was delicious. In the second place, if it wasn’t yummy, you could just order something else! Here are some indications of my enjoyment of the food:

1. When I reviewed the notes I’d written for the blog, I mentioned the food four different times.

2. I even tried their fried eggs at breakfast one morning. (I have never really liked eggs, and I especially dislike fried eggs. But they were just sitting there calling to me. Also, the whites did not have the texture of snot. So, win!) I also tried poached eggs!

3. I had fried eggs again. Voluntarily. I even started making myself fried eggs when I got home! (Tragically, I have not managed to make them without the snot texture.)

4. A couple months later, at my first prenatal appointment, Susan (my midwife) looked at my weight gain to that point and said, “So, do you think is all from the pregnancy?” And I totally blamed at least five pounds on the cruise.

5. There was sushi a couple of times. And since I had learned from research that the real problem with sushi in pregnancy is not the sushi itself but simply the possibility of food poisoning,* I ate some. And felt just a little bit naughty. But also really, really happy.

This was my favorite of the restaurants, though
you really can't tell how pretty it was.

The ambience in the restaurants was lovely. Seriously, these are some fancy restaurants. My favorite (you eat at a different one each night) was made to look like a garden, and the lighting changed as the night got later, so it was like the sun was setting. The room was decorated in lovely dusty pink and sort of a pale sage green. Really pretty. It was fun eating someplace so fancy.

There was this steak one night that I sort of wanted to eat until I died. Mostly because of the sauce. Also, I tried black truffle pasta—because why not? (It wasn’t that epic, but it was still tasty.) And Brice and I both tried escargot (smothered in butter, so it was acceptable—but not something I’d regularly eat). Those were some of the exciting highlights, but really everything was just tasty.

Brice and I discussed why the food was so especially great, and we came up with a couple reasons. The main reason, of course, was just that it was good. But the backup reason—which Brice pointed out—was that it was good, but without a price tag attached. So instead of looking at the menu, then looking at the prices, then saying, “Too rich for my blood,” we just ate. Whatever looked good. Regardless of price. It makes a shocking difference. It makes me think that in the future, when we take vacations, we should make it a point to go out one time to a really swanky restaurant, order something amazing, and just count it as a cost of the vacation.

You may be wondering about what the kids ate. Well, I’m sorry to report that they ate your usual run-of-the-mill kids’ food. We tried to get them to try a few new things here and there, but honestly—vacation is not the time to have arguments over trying that new weird-looking vegetable or that strange brown sauce. So we didn’t.

* And also, sushi food poisoning in pregnancy isn’t worse than out of pregnancy—except that everything is worse in pregnancy just generally. Unlike food poisoning like listeria, which is actually actively worse in pregnancy. So, sushi from a reputable, high quality place: probably not a problem. Sushi from the two-day-old counter at Food Lion: probably a problem. This digression brought to you by Science!