The croooose!

For my Dad's 60th birthday (which is actually next week) we surprised him with his favorite kind of vacation - a cruise! We'd gone on a cruise together once before and had a great time. Mom successfully kept the secret from him for months! He thought they were just coming down to visit. We also invited Rob's parents, who came with us on the other cruise, and they gladly accepted -- and so they surprised BOTH my parents by their arrival at the airport at the same time! So the 7 of us headed off for 4 days together on a big ship headed to the Bahamas :)

There are tons of pictures from the trip, so I'll just post a bunch here with some short headings.

The airport!


The ship: Carnival Sensation


This is our first meal after boarding the ship (lunch). We ate our lunches in this cafeteria-style area and then had nice fancy dinners every evening.

We got off to a good start on the first day of the cruise, as I won a little Carnival medallion and an art print (which I don't really like, but oh well). It was a trivia question: What language failed by ONE vote to become the national language of the U.S. ? Well, I don't know if it was Frau Hewitt who taught me this or someone else, but I was pretty sure it was German. Two other people jumped in ahead of me, but both of them were wrong. The first one was amazing....the (British) emcee of the trivia game repeated the question to her and she said "Britain...I mean like British, whatever they speak there...." It was like watching Jay Leno go Jaywalking in real life. So he explained to her that the language he was currently speaking was in fact English. The second lady guessed French. So I got the prize! Very exciting, eh?

Here is a nice photo that Rob's dad took of sunrise on the first day of the trip:


Enjoying Freeport -- several of us got off the ship and headed to the beach. Beautiful!


Back on the ship, we were always greeted with a new towel animal when we returned to our room. This day it was a walrus - the room steward had even put Rob's sunglasses on it.

Formal dinner night was the perfect night to have them bring my Dad a little birthday cake!


Thanks to our waiter, Pablo, for taking this shot for us.


Meredith was amazingly well-behaved at our sit-down dinners.


Here comes her lovely meal! (There was a lot more on another plate, as well as some fruit, but we were trying to keep it manageable to get started.)

Later in the evening on formal night, Dad and I sang in the Karaoke lounge. Ok, fine, so we sang EVERY night in the Karaoke lounge. But we looked the coolest on formal night :) Dad became a minor celebrity, with his own groups of fans who would recognize him during the day on the ship!


Here is a view of Nassau from the ship. We didn't spend much time on land because it was very hot and humid.


We discovered one great thing about being docked at a destination: many people from the ship are gone, leaving us with the full run of the place! The ship had a splash park, waterslides, and a mini golf course on the very top. It was perfect for our little girl!




The grown-ups tried out the waterslides too! Here are Rob's parents.


We went mini-golfing twice (in case you notice Meredith switching outfits...).



When she got close to the hole, Meredith decided it was most efficient to just pick up the ball and put it in.


The last dinner -- Meredith went all out, with a patch that matched her outfit! Everyone oohed and aahed over her as we walked by. The waiters had made her a little boot out of a napkin, which we used to bring one of her cookies back to our room after dinner.

Here's what Meredith sometimes does now when you ask her to smile. Apparently, from this picture, she learned it from me.




We had such a special and memorable time with our family. It's not the kind of thing we can do often, but we hope we'll have another chance someday to cruise again with everyone.

That pesky "R"

A couple of fun stories....

Meredith has always been a fan of picking up little rocks out of our landscaping. Quite a while ago, when she was just starting to walk on her own, we would go outside for a walk and she would pick up a rock and carry it in one hand for the whole walk (while she held my hand with her other one). A couple months ago she started saying the word "walk," which was really helpful if I was carrying her around somewhere and she wanted to get down and walk. She said "walk" yesterday when we were coming back inside after being in the car. Seemed like a strange time to say she wanted to walk (she was already walking)....then I turned around and watched her pick up two rocks from the landscaping. Then she looked at me and said "Walk." Aha...she was not saying walk. She was saying "rock." They just sound identical :)

Yesterday we were at Walgreens and Meredith was pointing out a bunch of helium balloons to me. Usually she would say "boomboom" -- that's always been her word for "balloon." Yesterday, she was pointing and saying "hot." I mentioned in an earlier post that she knows the meaning of the word "hot." Knowing this, I tried to figure out what was "hot" about the balloons. We had never talked about hot air balloons, so that wasn't it. So we had the usual type of conversation:

Meredith: "Hot!"
Mommy: "Do you see balloons?"
Meredith: "Hot!"
Mommy: "Honey, what is hot? I see balloons. Do you see balloons?"
Meredith: "Hot!"

At this point Meredith was pointing to a specific balloon. I looked up at it. Did it have a picture of a fire or a sun on it? Was there something that reminded her of heat? No. It was a heart-shaped balloon. Heart. Take out the "R" and you've got something like "hot"! So I said "Oh! Is that balloon shaped like a heart?" This was, as usual, followed by the excited happy sound of a little girl who had once again, with great persistence, made herself understood. What a trooper.

Cookies

Today Meredith was having a snack - a little bowl of crackers - and some milk. I remembered that we had some cookies on the counter that needed to get eaten up, and I figured I'd give her a treat.

Me: "Do you want a cookie?"
Meredith: "Cooo-kie!" (and a big nod)

So I got her a cookie and we sat here eating our cookies together (you figured that I got one too, right?). I asked her to take some drinks of milk, which she did sometimes (other times, it was the polite "no"). At one point, she grabbed one of her crackers with her free hand and put it in her mouth. I think she must have just been spacing out and forgetting there was a cookie in one hand already....the reason I think this is that she put the cracker in her mouth and then immediately removed it and handed it to me, still whole. Apparently when you pit crackers against cookies, crackers do not win. Well, who didn't know that? But it's good to know she figured it out too.

After the cracker mistake, she pointed to the bowl of crackers....

Meredith: "Coooo-kie!"
Me: "You have a cookie in your hand. Those are crackers."
Meredith: (continuing to point at the bowl) "Cooo-kie!"
Me: "Cracker"
Meredith: (pointing inside the bowl) "Coooo-kie".

Would you believe it? I had served her crackers in a Sesame Street bowl that had Cookie Monster on the bottom of it (you can only see him when you are running low on food in it). When I realized this I said "Oh! Cookie MONSTER!". She made a very happy sound indicating that I had finally understood what she was telling me, and then kissed Cookie Monster through the remaining crackers.

Those crackers are still there, but the cookie....well, that's long gone.