On our way!!

(note to self: it's much more fun to blog about things when they happen than it is to blog about things that happened a month ago.

When I was writing about Thanksgiving and birthdays, I really wanted to write about our cruise. But now all I want to write about is Christmas.)

The morning we left, we woke up bright and early for church, fulfilled our duties there, dropped the kids off with my dad and went back home to finish packing ourselves.

Nick and I pack very differently for ourselves and he felt the need to document this fact.(when I say "Nick packs" what I really mean he puts the clothes I lay out for him into his suitcase)


me, throw in everything I think I might want to wear and hope it all fits

nick, everything perfectly folded and in its place

We finally got our selves ready, then headed over to the Creeks to meet up with more of our group. Our cruise sailed out of San Diego which is about a 6 hour drive for us so we drove to Long Beach to stay the night with Nick's sister Charity.

The car ride was long, but it didn't seem too bad with out children crying or needing to use the potty.

We stretched and got comfortable for a few minutes before heading out for dinner at CPK.

(Charity, Rachael, Preston, Dave, Shalee, Nick and Me)

First picture on the ship!!! It was raining really hard the day we boarded, we saw some really scary (and deadly) car accidents on the drive from LB to SD. Getting from the car to the ship would have made for some good pictures. With all the wind and rain we looked quite ridiculous I'm sure, but I was more concerned with not flying away in the wind than I was pulling out the camera (which would have been ruined by the rain anyway.) We had to go strait to our rooms and change into dry clothes.

here we are after finishing our first meal on the ship, and me with my first of countless cups of hot chocolate

These are the friends we hang out with most often. They each have two kids of their own and when we get together, 8 kids means playing games all as a group is pretty difficult. It was no suprise that the first thing we did was play a rummy game that Preston taught us.

waiting at our muster station to hear all of the emergency information.

Because of the storm the ship was rocking pretty hard all day. Even the crew said that it was really bad. A few in our group went to bed and people all over the ship were getting sick. The crowd on the ship was slowly shrinking all night as people were heading back to their rooms. Someone (probably Nick and Dave) thought it would be fun to go out to the front of the ship. Keep in mind that all of these pictures were taken on the dark. The only light we saw was the flash of the camera.

It was crazy out there, the wind was so strong it felt like a gust might just pick out up and throw you. It was hard to breathe. You could literally put all of your weight into the wind and it would keep you up.

wind blown hair on the way to dinner.

We sat down at our table for dinner, minus a few, and I got as far as ordering my meal, but when they brought it I knew I better not eat it. I went back to our room to sleep the motion sickness away. Nick said that in the end our table of 9 was down to 3.

But even with the storm it was so much fun to be there and we were all anticipating a wonderful week ahead.