Family Cruise...Finally!

As y'all know we went on the Freeman Family Cruise 2008 last month, and I'm just now getting around to writing about it all (potty training takes up a ton of time!).

This was Zack doing the mandatory check so that we'd know how to abandon ship properly. I was a little nervous being on the boat...too much Titanic...ironically it was on tv while we were on the boat and I had to turn the channel immediately! Matt had to remind me that we weren't near any iceburgs, but then I told him that there are Pirates in the Caribbean and he just laughed.

Zack had a blast being with his cousins for the entire week. Zack established his own schedule for the week: breakfast, play hard, lunch, play hard, get cranky and go with Mommy to the room for a nap, dinner, little more play time, bed time. He slept really hard too! For instance, he fell asleep standing up here! I had to capture the moment!


This was Zack enjoying a game of golf. It was really windy and he got frustrated. I thought it was beautiful playing up there and being able to look out across the ocean.

We were on the Carnival Glory. It was pretty nice, and I thought that the staff were really friendly. The food was really good, even for a picky eater like me. Matt would eat 3 dinners sometimes. I'm proud to say I didn't gain any weight. Zack ate fruit at every meal, sometimes an entire bunch of grapes b/c our waiters knew that he liked them. I didn't enjoy the clean up of that (if you know what I mean!). We were scheduled for 3 stops: Bahamas, St. Thomas, and St. Maarten. However, if any of y'all watched the weather a month ago, you would know that Hurrican Omar popped up in the Atlantic and we had to cancel the stop in St. Maarten. I wasn't that bummed b/c they scheduled a stop in Grand Turk, and that ended up being my favorite stop on the cruise.


One of the highlights of our trip was the last night when they choose regular guests on the cruise and get them to perform at the large theater in a show called "Carnival Legends". Matt is a singer for those of you who didn't know, and he volunteered/was selected to sing the finale song as Frank Sinatra, the song "My Way". We have the video of it and when I figure out how to post it I will. It was great. The funniest part of it though was Matt didn't know the lyrics to the song, so he put the words in his hat and read them, but he hit every note and had everyone wowed at the end of it. He loved singing with the live band too.

Another highlight for Matt was winning the Ping-Pong tournament. They gave him a cheesy trophy for it. All I have to say is don't try to play ping-pong against someone who served their mission in Korea!
Somewhere in this I was going to mention this little story about Zack. On the second night (Sunday) I had a headache and was feeling really seasick and so I was laying down in our room. Matt wanted to roam the boat, so I asked my niece to watch Zack in her room for a little while. An hour later I got a knock at the door and Zack was crying in my niece's arms. He had fallen off of the bottom step of the ladder and had knocked his head. My niece said "Where is this blood from on my hands?" I checked Zack's head and sure enough it was gushing out pretty good. I grabbed my room key and ran out the door towards the stairway to the infirmary with Zack in my arms. Just as I ran toward the stairs I saw my sisters-in-law and they were able to help find the cut, clean the blood from Zack's hair, and tell me that he didn't require stitches. The cut was only 2 cm, if that! Evidently head injuries bleed a lot worse than they really are. What can I say, I'm a paranoid mama!
Below are a few more random pics from our trip.




I also need to mention that by the last day Zack thought he was one of the big kids and walked right down the beach and straight into the water, no worries at all. I feel as if he grew up a lot on this trip.