Second Sea Day

First on the menu today...Character breakfast! The children were super excited. We had photo opportunities with Mickey, Mickey, Pluto, Goofy, Chip and Dale throughout breakfast. Jonah loved waving hello and goodbye from afar but shrieked as soon as they got too close. We still have not managed to get a photo of him with any character.

We dropped all three children at their respective “clubs” to finally be able to spend some time together on the ship! We sorted out flights, gratuities, rebookings and got the final amount of onboard credit left. We browsed through our photos at Shutters and decided against purchasing the $399 photo CD. This meant that we had to do some serious shopping for Disney Merchandise. We bought Elliot the Goofy hat he desperately wanted, Lara her bracelet with Disney charms and myself the Dooney and Burke bag.

We attempted to pick the children up for lunch so we could go to Disney Trivia as a family. Unfortunately, we got rejected. The only child who still loved us more than the kids clubs was Jonah who came with a smile for a lunch of hot dogs by the pool, finished off with some soft serve ice-cream.

I finally managed to get some time to relax on the balcony with brownies and a cup of tea during Jonah’s afternoon nap. It was bliss. However, there was little time to waste. We had to hurry to an art auction for a chance to win $1000 worth of Disney art. We sat through the auction in eager anticipation of the draw. Our raffle numbers were 44306 and 44307. The announcer called “And the winning number is..... 4...4...3...0...5! Arggghhh!!!! Close but no cigar.

We received another big stash of FE gift deliveries today. The children have enjoyed looking for and finding little surprises in the bag. The gifts have been wonderful, little personalised mousemats, pencils, sweets, drink holders, charms. The list goes on. They were all well thought out and packed beautifully. I was somewhat ashamed of my effort. I had chocolates with Australian animals on them as well as badges of the Australian flag. However, all grand notions of cute, personalised Disney packaging never came to fruition in the chaos leading up to the trip. It is something that we’re definitely keen to participate in again if the numbers are small. We only had small groups of 12 for this cruise, and I thought that worked well. Not too much to carry but enough to have fun.

After dinner, we all went to watch Villains Tonight, a new production which premiered on the previous cruise. Many reviews slammed the show but I enjoyed it. Perhaps it was because I had nothing to compare it to. I just realised today that in our hectic schedule, I have not been to a single karaoke session! How could this be?!?!?! Meanwhile my parents have been to lecture series, cooking classes, napkin folding, scrapbooking. They have even befriended our head waiter, who is also Indonesian, and managed to arranged nasi goreng complete with sambal for tomorrow night. Apparently, the chef at Parrot Cay is also Indonesian.

We’re off to Corsica, France, tomorrow. I’m relieved that we’re simply pottering around town. At the moment, I need another holiday to recover from this one...