To Florida and Back

The driving from to and from Florida almost merits it's own blog post. With 17 hours each way in less than 12 days we felt like we had done some serious time in the car.We planned our Disney Cruise with time to visit Jeffrey and Debbie in their new Florida house that we haven't seen yet. These kids love their Jacobson cousins they played so well together for the four days we saw them.

 Jeffrey had prepped us and said that Florida is "always 80 degrees and sunny" so we could definitely fit in a beach day. Turns out the weekend we were there it was 69 windy and rainy almost every day. We still tried to fit in a beach day....

 Most of us were weak and huddled in their beach tent while the brave ones played in the sand and a few of them actually got in the water.

 This was us on the morning of our cruise driving to the port.

 The last morning we had to be packed up, out of our rooms and in the dining room for breakfast at 7:15. After all the late night shows getting the kids up at 6:45 was not fun.  This was at 9am after debarking and heading home. The two girls crashed within 30 minutes of driving home.

We had originally planned on splitting the drive up into two days for the way home but when I figured out we would be in Houston by 11pm I asked David to let me just shot gun it all the way home. So we did, and it wasn't as painful as I thought!

Disney Cruise Part #2

I don't want to idealize the cruise so much that I neglect to write that the kids favorite part of the cruise was watching the old school mickey cartoons that were playing 24/7 in the room. (Insert eye roll here.) These kids could have stayed in the little windowless cabin all day doing this. Luckily we managed to drag them out for the real fun!

Towel animals everyday were a big hit!

This was the animator's palate and the frames on the wall would fill up with sketches. Super cool!

The kids ate chicken strips/hamburgers and fries basically at every dinner. Oh well. We didn't care because it was vacation.

These little mickey ice creams came for dessert every night too. Totally awesome.

And oh the soft ice cream on the deck. Be still my heart. I'm sure we all ate at least 10 cones a day.

Including Rachel!

Castaway Cay day!! We didn't let the kids get off with us in the Bahamas. We put them in the kids clubs and David and I strolled around Nassau by ourselves so when we get off the ship for this day the kids were pumped!

And as we were walking to the trolley minutes after I took this picture we lost Scotty. From this point you walk down about 100 feet to get on a little trolley to the beach. As the kids were standing around waiting I counted to only 5 kids. I hurried and ran back the direction we came and he was standing with a Disney employee crying. We were away from him for less than 5 minutes but it was still sad. I was glad we were with Disney and right away he was with a worker and safe.

He recovered quickly and we headed to the clearest beach I have ever seen.

It was pretty cool in the morning so the kids played mostly in the sand.

Oh that water... I still dream about it.

Overall what we've learned from Disney Cruising with 6 kids is that it's still a lot of work. The kids absolutely loved the kids clubs but they didn't want to stay in there for more than a couple of hours at a time. Scotty was still going through some major separation anxiety and didn't want to stay in at all. The food was awesome as were the pools and slides. Sleeping wasn't that awful in two tiny cabins but over all we've decided when we do it again we'd like to wait til our youngest is 3 or 4! I had been dreaming of this cruise for so long that I'm so glad we did it and I hope we do again some day!