Hurricane Sandy Takes on Nassau

If you missed the first installment of our Disney Cruise adventure, click here.
Day two was our first day in a port.  Nassau, Bahamas.  Jeff, Logan, and I had booked a trip to the Atlantis Resort for a look at the aquarium and spending some time on the beach several months in advance of our trip.
Hurricane Sandy apparently did a lot of damage and we found out our first evening on the ship that our trip to Atlantis had been cancelled.  We were a little disappointed, but it saved us tons of money and meant we had a whole day to do as we pleased-on or off the ship!
We eventually made the decision to spend the day on the ship.  There were so many activities on board, so we decided to take advantage of our unexpected free time!

We started with breakfast at the Enchanted Garden.  I forgot to take a picture of the cute Mickey shaped waffles.

 After breakfast, we headed back towards our room to get Logan ready to go to the Kids Club, but we met up with a few new friends on our way!

Logan was quick friends with Peter Pan.  Peter Pan told Logan he would make a great Lost Boy!

Here's Logan meeting Tinkerbell for the first time.  He LOVED Tink!  Every time we saw a new character, Logan asked where "Tinkbell" was.

He has the biggest crush on her now!

Tinkerbell was so cute!  I'm a big fan too, but Logan would not allow me to take my picture with her.  "No Mommy! Stop!  You stay there!"

We just happened to run into Daisy on our way up to our room!

Logan was quick to give her a hug and a kiss on her beak (but I didn't catch that on camera)

He was a big fan of "Ducky" too.

Disney has this great Kids Club on board for children ages 3 to 10.  We had worked very hard before the cruise to get Logan potty trained because this was required to participate in the kids activities.  We had wandered through the kids area during an open house the night before and Logan was excited to go check it out some more.  Jeff and I were excited to get a little relaxation without a toddler with us on the ship!
It's a pretty cool process.  Each child has a wrist band that scans them into the kids area and only Jeff or I could pick him up.  Each stateroom had two "wave phones" (basically a cell phone that works on the ship).  If they needed to reach us at any time Logan was in the kids area, they could just call or text us!
Logan went right into the kids area like a big boy and Jeff and I took off for the upper deck with plans to enjoy a nice cold beverage and relax in the partially cloudy sun and hop in the hot tub for a while.
We were able to relax for about an hour before we got a text stating Logan was ready for us to come pick him up.
Apparently, Logan is the only child out there who is not a fan of the Kids Club.  I've never heard of any child who wanted to leave.  I think Logan was just overwhelmed by all the kids especially since he was on the young end of the spectrum.  He was smiling when we picked him up, so I think he had a good time, but he told in not so many words that he did not want to go back and play there again.
So much for adult only time...not too big of a deal since we had planned on spending most of the trip with Logan anyhow.  So much for the potty training crunch time too...ugh!

Logan having a mild meltdown.  These happened periodically throughout the trip since he was really not feeling the naps.  There was too much to do!

Jeff took this photo of me and tells me he gets this look a lot...hahaha!

We hit up the buffet for lunch and did a little on board Nassau sightseeing.

Nassau, Bahamas

The Boys!

Logan attempted to throw Jeff's Oakley's overboard...

Logan tried to get my sunglasses too.

It was a gorgeous area.  The water was so blue and clear even with the recent storm.

Atlantis Resort 

We watched Finding Nemo in 3D in the afternoon.  Logan was a big fan, but did not want to wear the glasses.  I loved that the ship had it's own movie theater!  I would have loved to watch all the movies that were shown, but there just wasn't enough time.
Dinner on our 2nd night was at The Animator's Palate.   I was super excited for this restaurant because I had heard a lot of neat things about it.  Our servers followed us to the new location, so that was nice too.  Barbie brought Logan Mickey shaped Mac 'n Cheese and Logan was in heaven!

Mickey Mac 'n Cheese and Mickey ketchup.

 This was such a cool place to eat.  During the meal, the black and white pictures on the wall came to life and Crush (from Finding Nemo) along with other Finding Nemo characters interacted with people in the restaurant.  They would swim from photo to photo, it was really cool.  Then at the end, all the pictures turned back into still life photos but in color!  I was glad we had watched Finding Nemo so Logan was familiar with these characters.

Crush welcomes us to dinner

Swimming through the pictures

The pictures at the end of dinner

Mommy and Logan

Logan is a big Buzz and Woody fan and sadly this was about as close to them as he got.  The ship really didn't have very many of the Disney Pixar stuff on board.

Logan wanted a photo op with Donald here.

After dinner, we met some more Disney friends who were now out of their Cruise apparel and into their dressy apparel.  I didn't realize that this was supposed to be the optional dressy night at dinner, so we were only kind of dressed up.  We never ended up wearing our formal dressy clothing!

Minnie, Logan, and Dog

Our Family with Minnie

Logan, Dog, and Donald

 We went to another show that night, "Villains Tonight".  It was wonderful too.  All the Disney Villains were helping Hades to bring more Evil to the underworld.  Amazing show.  Logan loved this one too even though they were "scary".
Apparently, the Disney villains weren't the scariest thing on board that night according to Logan.  We found this when we got back to our room!

A monkey over our bed wearing my sunglasses!

Logan was very upset and wanted the monkey taken down immediately!  He told all the stateroom hosts in our hallway that he "No like monkey!" for the rest of the cruise whenever he saw them!

Next up:  Our Day at Sea!!

M-I-C-K-E-Y...

Wow!  It's been a long time since I have blogged.  Working full time has made my blogging time hard to find.
Lucky for me, we just got back from an amazing Disney Cruise vacation.  Hurricane Sandy attempted to thwart our journey, but did not succeed!
We drove down to Cape Canaveral a few days early with plans to explore the Kennedy Space Museum.  Once we got there, we realized admission was $140!  We figured we could spend our money better elsewhere so we just hung around the hotel, waited out the storm, and did a little beach side shopping at Ron Jon.

Logan, King of Something...

This was our space encounter (in our hotel lobby)

Logan managed to find some miniature astronauts at Ron Jon's.

I have only been on one cruise my entire life.  It was a few years ago before we had Logan.  It was the most horrible experience ever.  The embarkation/debarkation process was a mess, the ship was small, it was boring, and if I didn't hear from several people that not all cruises were like that, I would have never taken a cruise again!
Our embarkation process went very smooth.  Thank you Disney Cruise Line!  We found the port easily, dropped our luggage off, parked our car and walked right up to present our passports in the terminal.  No waiting at all!
While we waited a very short time (about 30 minutes) to actually get onto the ship we found a few photo opportunities!

Logan meeting Donald Duck for the first time!  He was so excited!

Cool entrance to the boat, huh?

Our Family boarding photo!

We were quickly aboard the ship!  Our room wasn't quite ready so we ate a quick lunch at the buffet and explored the upper deck a little!

Logan wasted no time in catching some rays!

Once our room was ready, we took a quick trip back to the room and got changed into our swimsuits.  Logan was insisting we "go skwimmy" even though it was quite cool and VERY breezy!  I got the luck of the draw and went into the Mickey pool with Logan.  We forgot to take pictures of this extremely cold adventure...

The upper deck was really nice with two pools and a massive TV screen (you'll see photos of this later!).  There was an awesome water slide that a giant Mickey's hand was holding up in the air and the Aquaduck.  It was just way too cool on our cruise to take the plunge into either the water slide or the Aquaduck.  We probably would have done the Aquaduck (think lazy river meets tube slide hundreds of feet in the air!  You basically ride an inner tube inside a plastic tube that wraps around the ship's upper deck) but Logan wasn't tall enough yet and we never got the chance to do it on our own (more on that later...).

Our room was quite large with a huge porthole window!

After warming up and then eating ice cream (I know, it makes no sense, but we were letting the 3 year old call the shots...), we took the opportunity to meet a few more friends!

Getting a hug from Dale

Logan was still a bit in shock at this point

Meeting Mickey for the first time.

Logan was a fan of Goofy!

Yes, I did purchase some of the Cruise Photos!  They were too cute to resist!

 On that note, it was great that Disney allowed you to take photos with your own camera.  That being said...I need a new lens...and need to learn how to use my camera.  I was able to salvage some of my photos but often I didn't catch the smile like they did!

Our first night's dinner was in the Royal Palace.  I apologize, we didn't take any pictures.  It was all so overwhelming.  We forgot the camera a lot or had the camera but forgot to take any pictures.  The Royal Palace was a neat restaurant and our server Barbie was great.  She was able to tame the beast AKA Logan during his cranky time!  Our ship was rocking a lot during dinner.   At one point, we looked out the window and saw sky, then water, then sky, then water....you get the point.  Thank you, Hurricane Sandy.

After dinner, we had a few more photo ops with Donald.  Notice Logan is already in his PJ's.  We were going to the show afterwards and figured he would fall asleep during it.

I actually caught a pretty good picture here.

 Let me tell you!  The Disney Dream shows were amazing!  The first night was "The Golden Mickey's"  There were a few new songs, but most of the songs were classic Disney songs but the dancing and theatrics were so good.  I felt like I was watching an Broadway tour show.  Logan stayed awake for the whole thing and loved it!

 We wandered around the ship a bit more that evening, then called it a night so that we would be ready for our first port of call, Nassau, the next morning.

The gorgeous chandelier in the atrium

Oh, we did have to make one stop in the gift shop that night to pick up something VERY, VERY important!

Mickey Ears!!

Coming Soon: Day 2 at Nassau!

Mishy Mishy Mash Mash

Yup.  I've got a lot of random photos do go through, so this is going to be a very random post!  I have to say that I have one photo that I want to post SO bad, but I won't because it might be crossing the line into inappropriate...Let's just say Logan had a Magic Mike moment with nothing but a Fireman's hat...just get a mental picture of that one.  It will make you laugh!
We were fortunate enough to get together with my Dad's side of the family in July.  We had a great time.  We did miss my cousin Angela and her family, but understood why they couldn't make the LONG trip from where they live!  The kiddos had such a fun time together.  I have never seen so many dirty, happy kids.  My cousin, brother, and I have children that are almost stair steps so they are just perfect for playing together!

Of course my Dad took a family photo!

 Logan has quite the imagination.  He is really into pretend play.  His favorite game for a while was playing Dora the Explorer.  It was a lot of fun.  We would wander around the house searching for "Map".  Toys turned into rocks we had to jump over and every so often they would be an alligator that tried to gobble us up!!  Logan always managed to save the day and scream out "We Did It!"

Logan the Explorer

 He also crafted a swimming pool out of blankets one rainy morning.  Logan and I did cannonballs and splashed around for a long time that morning.

Swimming. Swimming.

 Logan had a streak a while back where he spent quite a bit of time in time out.  I know, shocker!  One day, while he was in his room for timeout.  I hear "I make I, I. I. I." (or something like that) coming from his room.  Soon, he comes marching out of his room like this...

He had managed to knock a basket off his dresser with old toys in it and an old Cards hat...

Really,  how can you be mad at that little cute thing!  Yes, I am aware that Logan is rarely in much more than his underwear here of late.  That is most likely why there are less pictures in general.  Logan prefers to run around the house naked these days!

Logan the Little Baker

I love to bake!  Logan is really liking to help out in the kitchen, so we decided to bake cookies a while back.  I asked Logan what kind of cookies he wanted and he replied "hot dog cookies".  He's obsessed with hot dogs...  I decided chocolate chip cookies sounded better.  I remember baking chocolate chip cookies with my Mom growing up and it was so fun!
Logan and I had a blast with the cookies.

Logan was really good at dumping the chocolate chips in (and eating them)

Cookie hands!

Logan showing off his handiwork.

The finished product.  Yummy!

Logan was sure to do a taste test for me.

We also whipped up some homemade ice cream sandwiches.  These little things are delicious and very kid friendly to make.  You can find the recipe here.

Logan giving our baking a thumbs up!

Stirring, stirring, stirring.

These are so good.  I think I ate most of them...