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?