Dinner in Bed

What better place to do family bonding than on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean?

I think Ern ate enough to make our money back on the whole trip.

I took some video of this little moment. Ernie is playing with his half eaten melon slice and saying "seesaw, seesaw". Then "Mina" several times, we think because he likes to ride the seesaw at school with his friend Mina. It's super cute that he has friendly relationships with the other kids at school, and a little bit of a bummer that we've temporarily taken him away from his routine to go on adventures. I think he forgives us.

We farted around in the arcade a lot. Luckily we're still in the stage where he doesn't know about inserting money into the machines.

I'll never get tired of how hard they were trying to sell this "art" on the ship.

They were cleaning the pools... I wonder if anything terrible happened in there.

Despite the convenience of the cafeteria sometimes we couldn't be bothered to exert even that level of effort. Awesomely, you could order room service and it didn't cost anything extra. And there was no discernible limit to what you could order. I.. put it to the test a few times but the limit does not exist.

I introduced Ernie to some Studio Ghibli on this trip such as My Neighbor Totoro. Dinner and a movie in bed is pretty luxurious.

My Goodness, My Guinness

We had another day at sea. Keeping Ern occupied was a little difficult because he wasn't old enough to go to the kids club on the ship. There was a room for younger kids with some toys and a tv playing kid's movies. It was unsupervised though so we had to be in there with him. It worked out.

Many of the gingerbread Christmas creations on the boat were hilariously nightmarish.

Ern in the kiddie room.

Ernie referred to this thing on the deck as the choo choo. We visited it numerous times.

It was funny we couldn't ever record on walks on our Apple watches because while we were walking our normal speed the ship was plowing through the ocean, so the watch thought we were cheating and jogging at 50 miles an hour or however fast we were traveling.

We did more perfume sampling surely than the rest of my cumulative life.

There was a library onboard and I was delighted that they actually had a book that I wanted to read. Erik Larson is one of my favorite authors who does non fiction stories that are so gripping they feel like fiction.

We did some playdough mess making at lunch.

Ernie had his first plantains today. I think he was a bit confused because his mom told him they were bananas. He wasn’t a fan at first but he stuck with it. The fake bananas were served in a fake Irish pub that didn’t have Guinness or any other Irish beer that I could see. The only beer on tap was Stella. I think this must be where bad Irish people go when they die.

They had a South African beer that I'd never tried before. I thought it was fun that they seemed to have random products that the ship picked up on its journeys around the world.

My book had some fascinating historical food and drink references.

We had dinner at one of the ship's restaurants to mix things up a little.

This was at Cagney's which was a steak house. So I ordered a steak.

We watched a show that was like a medley of song and dance through the decades. Turns out when you're trapped on a boat with no internet you'll pretty much watch paint dry.