We're home!!

Yes, we arrived home more than 24 hours ago. We are enjoying a day of not doing much. I didn't get out of my pjs until close to 2:00 (gasp! shudder!). I emptied most of the suitcases, Jon took the kids to get the oil changed in his car and he cut down a huge branch of a tree right next to our house. I was a little nervous about that one and even brought the phone out with me in case I had to call 911 :-) No problems, though, so life is good. Here is a blog I started typing on the plane:

We have already begun our descent to MSP, so I’m not sure how long I’ll have yet to type this update. We are glad to be going home. Vacation is fun, but I think we are all longing for our own beds! I think the kids are especially looking forward to it…especially Connor. Elianna is not a fun one to sleep with! They did have their own beds on the cruise and one of the nights in the hotel, but otherwise they’ve had to share. (Neither Jon nor I want to sleep with either one! They cuddle too much :-))

Here’s a breakdown of where we stayed on the trip:
1 night hotel in downtown Seattle
7 nights cruise
1 night hotel near Mt. St. Helens
1 night hotel in Olympia
1 night guest house on San Juan Island
1 night hotel in Bellingham
1 night hotel Sea-Tac

And yes, we did do laundry on the trip! One of the nights on the cruise they had a fill the bag for $15. You can fit a lot of kid clothes in the bag! I also put in some of mine and Jon’s stuff too. I also did laundry when we stayed in Bellingham. It will be nice not to come home with too many dirty clothes. Jon’s method for packing for the trip was to pack things he could throw away after he wore them. He had some older boxers, t-shirts and socks that all found their way to the garbage on the Norwegian Star.

There were some things that we packed really well, and of course I overpacked things too. I packed to many clothes for warmer weather. I had thought that when we were in WA we would need a few tank tops, but I only wore one and Elianna didn’t wear any. I packed too many shorts for myself and Elianna too (her clothes are so little…it is so easy to overpack!) I also took a long 2 dressy outfits for both kids, but they never ate dinner with us in the main dining room. We did eat there a couple of times for breakfast and once for lunch, but then we didn’t have to dress up. Oh well!

Would I cruise Norwegian again? If the kids were coming along, probably. It is nice to be able to feed them and not have a set schedule for when we were going to eat. But, I don’t think the food was as good as the stuff we’ve had on Royal Caribbean and Carnival. We did make it to a specialty restaurant one night (that did NOT have a surcharge) but it was very hard to get reservations. If Kate and Khachick had not been in a suite and been able to call 48 hours in advance (rather than 24 for everyone else) we would not have been able to get a reservation. It is frustrating too to have an additional 6 restaurants as a choice, but having to pay an additional $15 - $35 per person to eat there. I’ve paid enough for my cruise, just include the food too!!

(That's as far as I got on the plane, now back to the present)

So everyone but me got to sleep in their own beds last night. I do have to admit that Jon asked if I wanted him to go, but he was already asleep and I was still awake reading (because I had taken a nap on the comfy couch in the basement!). Connor had come into our room crying uncontrollably. He said he was scared in his room by himself. I guess he liked all of us in the same room! But come on! We're not that far apart in our house! So I went and tucked him back in bed. We tried to find the night light we had taken along on the cruise (so there would be some light during the night in our inside cabin). Couldn't find it. So, I took one of the ones from Elianna's room. He went back to bed okay. But then about 10 minutes later he came back in crying again. He also said his head kind of hurt, so I gave him some ibuprofen and offered to sleep in his room with him. Thankfully he has a trundle bed, so I don't have to sleep on the hard floor like in E's room. But, that trundle is not as comfortable as my own bed!! But our little guy slept through the night after that.

Jon and I both slept until around 8:30. That's really late for us. I guess we were still on WA time. Connor slept until almost 10. I don't even know what time Elianna woke up. She was up early, had stopped in our room, but then went downstairs to watch TV.

I think I have all our pics downloaded to this computer now. I'll see if I can post a few from the trip :-)