Cruisin' recap! (Long post ahead!)

YES, I'm back! And I'm so far behind on blogging I don't hardly know where to begin! :P We left on Friday the 19th and drove straight to Miami......19+ hours on the road. Thankfully, the kids all passed out around 9PM, so a lot of the drive was with them asleep (yay!). Karl woke me up somewhere in Georgia to take over driving as he was exhausted. Once we got to Miami, we checked into our hotel for the night and all took LONG naps....then went to the pool!

Sunday, Dec. 21st was our departure day...of course we had to muster:

then we said goodbye to Miami and were off to the Carribbean!

That night there was a 'welcome dance party' at Camp Carnival, where we saw Funship Freddy....

Monday, we were at sea all day, so the kids went to Camp Carnival......Zach lasted all of 37 minutes before we were paged to come pick him up! Alaina stayed in her class though, and they were rehearsing for a Christmas program they were going to put on the next day. so we just explored the ship for a bit...

We took lots of naps on this vacation, as the whole point was to get some rest (and enjoy a warmer climate!) and relax and just hang out together!

Tuesday was the kids' program, so after a quick swim in the morning.......
Alaina headed off for her last practice. She was super excited because she'd gotten picked to sing a solo in the program! And since she was the only one singing any kind of solo, we were quite proud of her! So we made sure to get good seats for the program:

The after naps, we were pulling into San Juan, Puerto Rico....I was the only one awake, so I went up on deck to snag some shots of the old forts as we pulled in to dock...


And a fellow passenger was kind enough to snap a pic with ME in it (something that didn't happen very often!)...

So by the time Karl and the kids were up and we'd eaten dinner, it was dark in San Juan and it was also raining....so we didn't hang out long. We went ashore and found a couple picture-worthy places..... then another group shot from a fellow passenger and back onto the ship!

The next day, Wednesday, was Christmas Eve.....and we were in St. Thomas! All we wanted to do was hang out on a beach all day....so that's exactly what we did.....we went to Emerald Beach where the water was calm, the beach was clean, and it wasn't crowded at all:

AHHHH........

When we got back, we hung stockings in our cabin for Santa.....

The next day was Christmas day, and we were in St. Maarten........so in honor of the day, take note of the headgear:



We went to Orient Beach and not only was it super-crowded, but the waves were really rough.....but that let us enjoy boogie-boarding for the first time!

making "sand angels" instead of snow angels:

The next two days were at sea heading back north to Miami, so we hung out on the ship....the kids participated in a build-a-bear workshop-type thing (parents paying dearly for said bears of course!)

And the kids wanted to take their "bears" to formal night (none of the kids actually made a BEAR at all....Alaina chose a Husky, Matthew picked a Moose, and Zach wanted a 'towman')....
Matthew wasn't tall enough, so Alaina was the only one that got to try out the big waterslide on the ship:

And then on the last day we all played a round of miniature golf up on the top deck....it was really windy with the boat rocking, we had the perfect excuse for our crummy scores!



I would push Zach around in his stroller quite a bit (and ride the glass elevators), so I got lots of chances to take some pictures of the ship....

Then on Sunday morning we were back in Miami.....I took the traditional cruise pictures of the kids while we were waiting for our debarking group to be called:
Then it was back to the van to start the drive home! We made a couple stops along the way....in Savannah, Georgia, where my aunt used to live....we went to dinner at a place she used to take us:

then the next day just as we were leaving the hotel, there was a big explosion and the power went out, so we had housekeeping staff carrying our luggage and Zach down the 5 flights of stairs to the ground......exciting!!

Then our next stop was at Karl's uncle Butch and Auntie Maria's house in Fort Mill, SC. We had dinner with their family and Karl got to see cousins and 2nd cousins he hadn't seen in many years! I already scrapped it, so I'll just post those:

And from there, the next morning we headed home, driving through 6 states in 12 hours. YAY! :) Then we had Christmas morning on New Year's Eve morning and then immediately left to come to Chicago to hang out with Karl's family. And I'll have to post that later (along with all the layouts I did in the car!) since this post is long enough already! But that was our vacation in a nutshell......lots of R&R and fun in the warm WARM sun!