Friday, May 29, 2015

In Memoriam

It's hard to believe it's been so long, but yesterday, May 28, was the 3rd anniversary of Rory's birth, death, and our short time with her. Marilu and I had talked about the date earlier in the week, but I'm ashamed to admit that I completely forgot what the date was until receiving a text message from a friend, saying that she was thinking about us. As I said to her at the time, I'm not certain if that's good or bad.

Whatever the case, we didn't dwell on the anniversary, and we decided not to mention it to Lucas. Why make ourselves miserable? We're obviously never going to forget Rory, but there are better ways to keep her in our hearts than crying once a year. For instance, Lucas still gets sad before bed from time to time, thinking about Rory (who he still thinks was a brother...we may tell him the truth next year). He also keeps a little angel that someone gave us (I'm sure Marilu will tell me who after she reads this), and he uses that to "talk" to Rory.

Life would probably be a lot different today if we had two rugrats running around, but I'm thankful that we at least have the one. Lucas may be a pain in the ass from time to time--a wonderful blend of genetics and karma, right there--but he's a great kid overall, and I'm so happy we have him in our life.

Monday, May 25, 2015

March Break 2015, Day 7-8: The End

And so we come to the last hours of our great Caribbean adventure. Before we left, we wanted to get some pictures of the main lobby. But before that, a final picture of our awesome cabin. ("awesome" since it was part of the vacation, and not so much because of the size or features)


When we got to the main lobby, we saw that Donald Duck (I accidentally typed that as Daffy initially) was posing for pictures on one of the balconies so we took advantage of the situation.



As you can see below, the chandeliers were pretty damn impressive.





Random porthole photo.


Just relaxing in the lobby.


Here's an example of what made our servers so cool. At dinner, Ashton was completely exhausted and lay down on a couple of the chairs. Our servers brought over some tablecloths and made him a pillow and blanket. Seriously, how cute is this?


Treasuring our last dinner on the cruise. Oh, how I miss it!


Lucas gets ready for bed with a new Stitch stuffy he bought on the cruise.


The next morning, I couldn't resist getting a photo with the Waiter of the Year (in our opinion), Ashang. The kids jumped in as well.


As you can see from this picture at the airport, it didn't take long for the kids to re-embrace the "wonders" of civilization.


And finally, this was the picture I took of our backyard right before I uploaded all these wonderful photos. Suffice to say, I wasn't happy to be home. Thankfully, it's much nicer now.


So that, as they say, is that. I hope you enjoyed living vicariously through our fantastic March break. I'm already counting down until the next cruise, whenever that might be.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

March Break 2015, Day 7: Castaway Cay

I'm getting senile in my old age. For some reason, I thought I posted the rest of the cruise photos. I guess all it takes is uploading one tease photo and I lose my mind. Anyway, now that I'm back to planet Earth, here's Day 7 at Castaway Cay. I think it's fair to say this was everyone's favorite day and port of call. For those not familiar with it, CC is a private island owned by Disney. It exists solely for the pleasure of Disney cruisers so no one is there when we get there (besides token staff) and when we leave, it goes back to sleep. It's a pretty cool concept, and I'm surprised none of the other cruise lines do something similar.

I only thought to take one photo of the beach from the ship, and it's not the greatest, but at least you get an idea of what it looked like from up top. This is the beach we were on, but there are at least a couple of others.


Posing with Disney characters on our walk to the beach.



Lucas and Jayden taking a break.


I included these two pictures just to give you an idea how large our ship was. It's not always obvious when you see it next to other ships, but by itself, man, that thing is big!



Fun little water structure that kept the kids occupied for a bit. Unfortunately, due to the tide going out, it was closed for most of the second half of our stay.


Wonder Boy! Although I don't have any pictures of it, we went snorkeling later on. There were a bunch of cool structures under water like submarines, ship "wreckage," and Mickey and Minnie statues so it was fun to go search for them together.
 

In the beach next to ours, there was this cool waterslide that dumped you out into the ocean. While everybody went on it, I stayed in this location so I could get some good photos.


I got this great one of everyone waiting in line (except me and Chris, who was also taking pictures). Unfortunately, immediately after this photo, my camera battery died. I had another battery with our stuff on the beach so all wasn't lost for the afternoon, but I missed action shots of the gang shooting down the waterslide.


That's the definition of relaxing right there.


Speaking of relaxing, the ladies enjoy the sun here. All that's missing are frosty adult beverages.



Sadly, we eventually had to leave.


In the next post, we'll wrap up with pictures from that night and the next morning, debarkation day. Boo! Hiss!

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Day 7 is coming!

I just narrowed down the 100+ photos from Day 7 of our cruise to 30. Unfortunately, it's past 1 AM right now so I'm going to do the first post for that sometime tomorrow. And then I'll wrap the whole shebang up on Friday or this weekend. So keep an eye out!

Here's a preview!


Wednesday, May 6, 2015

March Break 2015, Day 6: Last Day at Sea

Our last day at sea was a fairly lazy one. In fact, this one and only picture that I took on the main deck encapsulates that Thursday.


That night was probably the most special dinner. It was our second time at the Animator's Palate restaurant, and it was the night where they took our drawings (done before the meal) and turned them into cartoons. I've included some photos below, but honestly, this is one of those things you have to experience first hand to really understand how cool it was. At the end of this post, I've linked a YouTube video (not mine) just to give you an idea of what it was like.

Getting ready in the stateroom. It was another dressy dinner. You may notice in the 3rd picture that Lucas's framing skills need a bit of work.




Jumping ahead to the table...





And here are a couple of photos of our artwork. In the first one, you can see my character on the far left.


And in this one, Lucas's is the leftmost one as well. His was easily the most colorful character of the night.


At the end, they scroll through the names of all the animators. I was able to get all of ours in one shot here.


Like I said at the beginning, it's not much to look at in pictures so check out this video posted by Attractions Magazine to see the characters in motion.