This year is a big one for our family. Kendall and I both turned 30 within the last few weeks. This summer we will celebrate our 10 year anniversary, and then in July, Avrianna will turn 8 years old and she will get baptized. We decided that with it being such a year of milestones that we should do something awesome to celebrate. So we chose to take the entire family on this cruise. We planned for this for a year and were so excited to go. We drove down. Here is our first view of our ship, while we were still driving. :)
The check in process went faster than we expected, we got on the ship, we got lunch and we started exploring. It was so great that my parents went with us because we were able to divide the kids on occasion.
It also helped because we could only put 4 people in a room and we would have had to get two rooms and Kendall and I would have had to sleep in separate rooms. But instead, the boys slept in our room and the girls bunked in with my parents. Each of the kids had their own top bunk and they were thrilled!! Especially Rigdon who never gets to sleep on the top. :)
One of the days we took the kids up to the top deck to mini golf. They loved it and I'm sure we would have done it more if they hadn't love the Club Carnival more!! We couldn't get them to leave most of the time. And with the activities that they had planned I can understand why.
Here are a couple of pictures of our ship.
Talmage especially loved the orange life boats on the sides of the ship. He thought they were amazing.
The two older kids were big enough for the big slide, so we had some fun on that. Kendall got going so fast that he actually hit the stop at the bottom!! He also splashed a lady who was sunbathing on one of the decks as he came around one of the curves really fast. It was hilarious to watch her be completely confused why she was suddenly all wet.
The kids also LOVED the towel animals every night. They would race to the room so that they could be the first to see which animal we had. Here are some of the ones that we got pictures of before the kids had pulled them apart.
The adults all really enjoyed our evening meals. They were multi-course meals and we could order as many different things as we wanted. We tried things that we would never order at a restaurant, even frog legs!! They really do taste a lot like chicken! We didn't have to share our table with strangers since we had 8 in our party. But the kids mostly ate with the kids club and we just had a nice quiet dinner to ourselves. It was heaven.
Watching the sun set from the ship.
One night the girls chose to join us for the fancy dinner. Avri ate salmon and shrimp and a whole lot of other yummy favorites. That girl loves seafood!
My mom celebrated her birthday the last night that we were on the ship. My dad arranged for a gluten-free birthday cake and they didn't even charge extra! So we had this entire delicious cheesecake all to ourselves!!
And she even got serenaded by our servers.
I got a picture with our servers. The one giving the thumbs up was one of the alcohol guys who came around serving drinks. Kendall caught him drinking a bit of the leftovers. He was the happiest server!! haha. The tall one behind me was our favorite, Dan from Romania. He sounded just like Dracula, but loved the kids. The second night when we didn't bring them to dinner he said, in his thick accent "If you don't bring the kids, we won't serve you." Smile. He was funny.
This is Amber. She was over Avri and Talmage's age group and Talmage had the biggest crush on her.
Rigdon loved his kids club so much that he didn't even want to get off the ship to go to the beach. He just wanted to stay in the kids club.
Face painting was one of about a billion activities that the kids got to do.
Rigdon chose to have a little slumber party one night. :)
Here we are with our favorite Dan.
Getting ready to get off the ship and head home. It's always sad when vacation is over.
Next will be posts about the islands that we got to visit and some of our shore activities!!
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