Cruisin' to Mexico -Day 3 & 4

August 21st & 22nd

We had two full days on the cruise ship at sea.  Unfortunately, Sunday morning started out quite early as we woke up to what sounded like elephants on the walls at 6:30am.  Tom went over to the boys room (next door to us) and they were all up and moving around.  They claimed they weren't being loud, but as soon as they left to go eat breakfast, it got quiet again.  I was hoping to get a little more sleep, but with Tom coming in and out of our room it woke Cedric and Sophie up.  We found out Bryce and Sara's room was all awake too.  So at 6-something in the morning, we got up for the day and headed upstairs to breakfast.  

 The nice thing with getting up so early, was the ship wasn't crowded.  We had fun watching the kids play mini-golf, with hardly anyone else around.  It was such a gorgeous day too!

 Bryce, Lily and I started a game of HORSE in the basketball court, which soon turned into a game of lighting with almost the whole group, plus a few extra kids.

 We went back to our room to get the kids swimming suits on and Sophie and Cedric were excited to see the towel animal that was there (I think it was a dog).

 The pools were small and salty, the the kids managed to still have fun.  Lily had bought her swim suit online, using my PayPal account and without my permission.  But it was a really good deal and I have to admit, as much as it's hard to see her in a "grown-up" swimming suit, I think it's really cute on her.

 After swimming for a bit, we found the water slide.  The kids all tried going down.  And by tried I mean they had to push themselves down because it was a really slow slide.  However, it was perfect for Sophie and she loved it! 

 Another fun thing we did that day was the Harry Potter Trivia game.  Tom ended up tying for first place (It was a three-way tie and they did a sudden-death question, which Tom didn't get, so he technically tied for second place).  Here he is with the cruise guy that did the questions and his trophy.

 Tom and the older kids were going to go to the game room to play games.  I was going to take Sophie to Camp Carnival (the ships day care), but we overheard another family talk about the Dr. Seuss parade, so we followed them instead.  Well it ended up that Sophie and I got to be in the parade!

 We marched past the shopping center, through the casino and right past the game room, where the rest of the family was playing games.  We waved as we went by and ended up on the stage in the big theater.  Cedric saw us and wanted to join, so Tom brought him in.  The kids got to watch a cute play of The Cat in the Hat.  Although it wasn't my choice of activity, it was fun to be there with the kids.  And the play was pretty funny.

 After dinner that night, we decided to try taking the kids to the Camp Carnival.  Sophie was in a class with other children ages 2-5, Cedric was next door with kids ages 6-8.  However, Sophie refused to stay without me and so they brought Cedric in to be her buddy.  We only left them for less than an hour, but I couldn't help but worry about her the whole time, so I don't even remember what we did during our "kid-free" time.  When I went back to get them the teachers said they'd just called our room and left a message that Sophie was still having a hard time.  I blamed it on the fact that she'd been up since 6:30am and it was now 9:30pm, but I felt bad for her and them.  We met up wit the rest of the group to watch a magician that was really good!  However, Sophie didn't last long, so Tom volunteered to take her to bed so I could stay with the other kids and watch the show.

 It was after mid-night by the time I was headed to bed, but I couldn't go to sleep without making a birthday banner for Lily (her birthday was the next day).  I took the crown Cedric got from Camp Carnival and the post-its that we had on our doors (so we could let each other know where we were, since there's no cell service on the ship).  And I made her an armature birthday sign.

 The next day we slept in a little better.  I didn't worry so much about the boys and so I was able to sleep in a bit.  We headed up to breakfast.  Here is a picture of one of the cruise workers talking to Cedric and Sophie.  They just loved our little kids and this particular lady would come and talk to Sophie every day.

 Since our room got up a little later than the rest, it ended up just being me, Tom, Sophie and Cedric for the morning.  We got some ice cream cones and wandered around the ship for a bit.

 We did eventually run into the other kids playing a giant game of chess.

 We decided to try Camp Carnival again and this time, Sophie went in much better!  She gave me a hug and went right in by herself!

 Tom and I were excited to be kid-free again.  We met up with Eric and Carlee for the Friends trivia game.  

 I still was worried about the kids and so an hour and a half after dropping them off, I went back to get them.  Sure enough, Sophie was crying again.  The teachers said they'd called our room about 20 minutes before and tried bringing Cedric in again, but that only helped a little bit.  Sophie said she was sad because she missed us.  

We had lunch and Cedric had a hot chocolate every meal.  He probably drank twenty cups of the stuff over the course of the cruise.

 That afternoon we watched the kids learn the steps to the dance "Thriller".  I wanted to join too, but something caused us to be late and so I just enjoyed watching them.

 After the dance, the magician was doing another show!  We were able to all meet up to watch and had great seats in the balcony.

 Our nephew, Talmage got picked to be the magicians assistant.  It was cool to watch, but Jeff wished it could've been him, since he loves magic.

 That night, we got dressed for dinner early and headed down to do Karaoke.  When I walked in, Lily was on stage doing a beautiful song. 

 Jeff also did a song. 

Sophie had fun playing with the wall decor (it was all Alice in Wonderland stuff because the room was called the Mad Hatter Lounge).  I caught her at one point picking the Mad Hatter's nose and pretending to eat it. 

 We headed up for our third night in the dinning room.  This time, we had Tom's parents sit with us.

 Because it was Lily's birthday, I'd pre-ordered a cake and they came out and sang to her (more about her birthday on a few posts previously).

 After dinner we went to the comedy show where two comedians were performing.  Jeff always liked sitting up close so he would get picked on for questions and such.  It actually happened several times.

 That night, we decided to play games.  We found a quiet spot in the restaurant (it was mostly closed by then so the place was vacant).

 Cedric enjoyed games on the iPad.  He'd missed his electronics.

 And despite being late, Sophie was really good to just play with her toys at her own table. 

It was a good end to a great day!

Cruisin' to Mexico -Day 1 & 2

August 19th & 20th 

Driving from Salt Lake to Long Beach

Sometime ago Tom and I wanted to go on a cruise to Alaska and decided to do it for his 40th birthday and go June 2016.  We wanted to invite Tom's family since we don't get to do many trips with them.  As we laid out the idea, several were interested, but Bryce and Sara wanted to bring their kids and Eric and Carlee could only go in August.  We decided that since Alaska wasn't the best kid-cruise and the price went up for that type of cruise in August, we'd switch to going on a more kid-friendly cruise to Mexico the end of August.  This seemed to work great for everyone who wanted to go, excited Maren and Tim, who announced after we'd made the trip change, that they were expecting a baby the end of August.  We were sad not all of his family could make it, but it's always hard to make things like this work for everyone.

Anyway, the day arrived to leave for the Cruise.  It was the same Friday Lily was coming back from Oackcrest, so our plan was to leave that afternoon (Tom's parents, Eric and Carlee left that morning and drove all the way to Long Beach that day.  Bryce and Sara's family was leaving that evening after work.)  I decided to make surprise bags for the kids to open about every 100 miles to help keep them happy on the long drive.  Here are a few of the things I packed...

 Our goal was to head out around 3:00, but it was closer to 4:00 by the time we pulled out of the driveway.

Each of us had a Smart Water water bottle that was to be our bottle for the remainder of the trip and we'd refill as needed. 

 Lily, being exhausted from Oakcrest fell asleep minutes into the drive and enjoyed a little nap.

 The kids did really well until we were around Fillmore area, then Sophie just started to cry and wanted to get out of the car.  We were able to make it to Beaver where we stopped and had dinner.  She was much happier after that.

 We made it to our hotel in Las Vegas aroun 11pm (which felt like midnight to us) and quickly went to sleep.  Bryce and Sara arrived about the same time we did.  We all got up early the next morning (6:30) and enjoyed a quick continental breakfast before heading off in the van again.  We wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to get to the pier because California traffic is always so unpredictable and we DID NOT want to miss the ship.

Just a few days earlier, there had been a huge fire in the San Bernardino mountains and the freeway had been closed.  Luckily, it was open when we drove through, but it was surreal to see the entire mountain still a dusty ash.  This picture shows where they were able to stop the fire with some red substance.  There were homes just below where the fire had stopped.

 Luckily, we didn't hit any major traffic and arrived to the Long Beach pier in the early afternoon.  We had to wait while the luggage was being tagged and loaded, wait while Tom parked the van, wait in line for security, and wait in line for check-in.  

 It was the worst check-in we've ever had getting on a cruise ship and with kids who had been cooped up in a van for two days, it was even worse.  The other lame thing was they wouldn't let us take our Smart Water bottles with us and we had to chuck them.  That made us a little mad.  We waited in a warehouse type room for probably an hour.  It was terrible.

 But soon we finally got checked in and walked across the bridge to the ship!  We all felt a little better and more excited as we approached our new home for the next week.

 The first thing we did was check out our rooms.  We were able to get rooms with balcony's for a good deal, and this was Tom and my first time having a balcony room.  

 The room set-up was as follows:  Bryce, Sara, Kate (8) and Lily (13) in a room; Hunter (15), Marcus (13), Talmage (10) and Jeff (10) in a room; me, Tom, Cedric (7) and Sophie (4) in another room.  Tom's parents room was next to ours and Eric and Carlee were down the hall in an inside cabin.

 The next thing we did was go to the buffet and grab a late lunch/snack.  It was fun to meet up with our whole group for the first time.

 There were 16 in our group (8 kids and 8 adults).  Here we are all crammed on an elevator.

 The next event was doing the safety drill.  Sophie was so tired by this point and we were again waiting so long, that she soon fell asleep.  Cedric about did too.  It was hard to be patient while waiting.

 That night we had our first dinner in the dining room.  The kids thought it was so fun to be in such a fancy place.  Unfortunately, Jeff started to get a migraine mid-meal, so I took him back to his room, got him some medicine and turned on a movie on the portable DVD player before heading back to the dining room to finish my dinner. 

 Half of our group were seated by a bay window, with a beautiful view out the back of the boat. 

Here's the three girl cousins sitting in the window.

 Leaving dinner, we ran into an elephant towel character.  The photographer obviously didn't want me to take any of my own pictures as he kept getting in my way.

 The kids were pretty tired after a long day and went to bed really well.  The hard thing with having little kids is once they were done, we had to be done.

 However, Tom and I found creative ways to still have fun.  We grabbed some pizza, hot chocolate and lemonade from the buffet (just two floors up from our room) and brought them back to our room.  We enjoyed a nice, quiet date on our balcony as we looked out upon the vast ocean and beautiful moon reflecting in the water.

Our first day on the Carnival Miracle had come to an end.