Funny Stuff

My sister Wendy recently had baby #5, and I held him quite a bit while we were at her house. The most memorable conversation I had this Christmas Eve was with Riley and Dallin regarding babies. I was sitting at the kids table while we ate dinner, and Riley said "When are you gonna get a baby?"

Then 7-year-old Dallin looked at me very seriously and said, "Do you know how to fertilize?"

When I gave him kind of a shocked look, he recovered with, "I mean, (pointing to Spencer) does he know how to fertilize?"

At that point it was hard to hold in the laughter (my sister Shauna and I were the only adults that heard him say this). Thanks, Dallin, for the laughs. We'll be sure to tease you about it in a few years when you understand the implications of your question well enough to be embarrassed by it.

Christmas

Every Christmas Eve my family has a yummy dinner and then a talent show before reading the Christmas story in the Bible. I didn't take very many pictures, but there was lots of music with:

dancing,

spinning,

and stomping when the kids did their talents.

Shauna, Dan, and James played percussion to "The Little Drummer Boy."

Elayna got a hold of the cymbals and didn't want to let go.

Dallin played some Christmas carols on the violin. He was pretty good!

We also had a white elephant gift exchange, and here's Shauna modeling the attractive new biking outfit she opened. Spencer got some athlete's foot spray, and I got the single of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" on tape. We both "accidentally" left our loot at Wendy's house.

For the majority of our stay at my parents' house, we were busy playing serious games of ping pong. Spencer even beat my Dad quite a few times! You might not think that's very impressive, but it took me about 3 years to beat him, and I can still only do it once in a blue moon.

Cozumel, Mexico

Our last stop was Cozumel, Mexico, which ended up being one of my favorites. Everyone that we'd talked to on board seemed to really be looking forward to docking here because of the clear blue water.

Showing off the massive-ness of these ships.

Who wouldn't want to swim in water like this?

We decided to go snorkeling again, and there were several different beaches to choose from. We'd heard that Chankanaab was the most popular and very beautiful, but it cost $16 per person just to get in. So we opted for Dzul Ha, a much less crowded "beach" that we heard had tons of cool fish - and it was free!

Snorkeling here was pretty awesome. We saw lots of multicolored fish, big ones, small ones, long ones, short ones, etc. And they'd swim right up to us. One of the coolest things I saw actually happened when my head was out of the water. I was adjusting my mask, and this school of little tiny fish starting jumping out of the water (kind of like the wave at a football game). Then some of the bigger fish would jump out to eat them. It was so neat, I was totally mesmerized by it.

We actually got in 2 times, but after about 10 minutes of snorkeling the second time, I saw a jellyfish. I told Spencer, and we quickly decided to get out.

Lookin' for lunch?

Later that afternoon we went to town and looked through the shops. It was kind of funny to see Christmas decorations like this ginormous tree outside because the 85 degree weather hardly felt like Christmas. We also got a good laugh at some of the waiters at the restaurants, who would be outside trying to get people to come in. When we walked by they yelled, "Honeymooners, honeymooners!" to get our attention.

Guatemala

Our destination on day 4 was Santo Tomas de Castilla, Guatemala. The island looked so beautiful from the top deck of our ship.

We checked out this market area on the pier to do a little shopping before our excursion. Like Honduras, the people were kind of pushy. If you even eyed a piece of jewelry, they were right next to you saying "special price for you" or "you like something?" It was pretty crazy, but at the same time I always felt kind of bad for saying "no thanks."

A little live entertainment while we shopped.

We booked a "4 hour kayaking eco tour" through the ship. We rode a boat to a resort on the island, where we did about 30 minutes of kayaking and then we were trapped at the resort for the other 3.5 hours until the boat came to pick us up again. So we tried to keep busy by swimming, going down some water slides, and exploring.

Some of the lush greenery surrounding the resort.

Visiting the lighthouse.

Chillin' on the beach.

These iguanas were in a cage at the resort, but we saw several others roaming around. They were huge!

That night was the second formal night on the ship. I think we look better in this picture because we have a little color (ok, so I have a little and Spencer has a lot).

A prom style pose in the Centrum (there really was a photographer that told us to stand like that... we just had someone else snap a photo with our camera too).

The folks at our table from left to right: Bill, Mandy, John, Spencer, Me, and Kate. Bill and Kate would talk about alcohol like it was going out of style, and we rarely saw Bill without a beer. That made for some pretty good entertainment. Surprisingly, Mandy and John were also from our neck of the woods, thus making it slightly easier to fill any awkward pauses in conversation with talk from "home."

Roatan, Honduras

We docked in Roatan, Honduras on Tuesday morning and headed out past the pier to see if we could bargain to do some excursions. These folks were dancing on the pier while some of their friends played the drums. We just wanted a picture with them, but these ladies started dancing up on Spencer was standing next to them (hence the slightly freaked out face).

Right outside the port was a very poor area, so people swarmed there to sell crafts, tours, and taxis. They were pretty pushy too- if you said "no, thank you" they would follow you and try to talk you into buying their taxi or doing their excursion. After much wheeling and dealing, we headed up to do a zip line over the jungle canopy. The drive was kind of scary because they don't have a speed limit, and people would constantly walk in the street and only scoot over a tiny bit if a car was coming. I think the only formal traffic rule was "honk if you're going around me," and our driver lady did a lot of honking.

All suited up and ready to go. We had 2 tour guides, and it was really nice because one guide would go ahead of us with our camera and take pictures as we zipped toward him. So here we are:

I had to consciously think to look down as we were cruising over the jungle.

Just taking it easy. But then we got a little more creative...

like going Superman-style

and even upside-down.

As you can see, the second tour guide would come with us whenever we did one of the more crazy things. I had decided that morning that I wasn't going to shave my legs, but I kind of regretted it when I realized that he held onto our legs when we flew like Superman and he grabbed our legs to tip us upside-down. Blast. He was probably thinking, "Ugh. Hairy pale American woman."

After the zip line we went back to our ship to have lunch, and then we changed into our swimsuits. We spent the afternoon at the West Bay beach, on the more touristy side of the island where there were resorts and restaurants.

This is our little friend Nelson, who was 12 and spoke very good English. His dad owned the taxi business that we used, so he just rode shotgun in our taxi. When we got out to go to the beach, he decided to stick around with us. He pretty much followed Spencer wherever he went. There were lots of bars on the beach, and he told us that the drinking age on the island was only 7 years old. When we talked to other people at dinner, they told us that 2 little girls came with them everywhere to be their tour guides. So if you ever plan on going to Roatan, expect some company.

Spencer had told our cab driver that he wanted to stop and get some leches, this little red spikey fruit that we kept seeing on the ground while we walked through the shops. When our taxi driver picked us up from the beach, he had already stopped and bought us a bag of them. We had to bite them open, and then peel away the skin to get the little white fruit. It was sweet, slimy, had kind of a gelatinous texture, and then there was a big seed in the middle.

We had a good time, but we were glad to get on our ship at the end of the day.

Grand Cayman

On day 2 of the cruise, we let down anchor and tendered to the dock near Georgetown, Grand Cayman. There were several "pirate" ships in the sea, and as we sped past them in our tendering boat, everyone got out their cameras to take pictures. Then the pirates shot a fake cannon at us and scared the crap out of everyone. It was pretty funny.

Pirates of the Caribbean.

Arr Matey... just walking around the shops while we wait for our excursion to start.

Some kid next to us took off his hat and gave it to the birds... totally weird. It took him about 5 minutes to wrestle it away from them.

And those are our only pictures from Grand Cayman. Before you think we are totally lame, we actually did do fun stuff on the island. We went to Stingray City, where we swam with the stingrays, fed them, held them, and even kissed them. I would highly recommend doing this if you ever get the chance, it was really cool. Unfortunately, the batteries in our camera died and we didn't have any extras with us, so we missed out on some awesome Kodak moments. The tour guides actually took pictures and then you could buy the CD afterwards, but it was $45! Rip-off! Anyway, after that we went snorkeling and saw lots of pretty fish before we had to get back on board.

That evening we had our first formal night in the Great Gatsby dining room.

When we went up to the top deck afterward, the wind almost knocked us over!

Just Cruisin'

We're back! Last week Spencer and I went on a 7 day cruise to the Western Caribbean, and we had a blast. I have to admit that we were slightly surprised at the predominance of geriatrics on the boat, and even folks under 30 were hard to come by.

Day 1 of the cruise was spent at sea, so we had fun exploring our ship and going to some of the activities that were going on throughout the day. Here's a mini tour of some of the hots spots on our ship:

Getting ready to board the Grandeur of the Seas in Tampa, Florida.

Doesn't Spencer look excited to run through the safety exercises?

We got an inside cabin, mostly because it was the cheapest option. It actually wasn't too bad, but one day we woke up at like 10 am and had no idea it was so late because we didn't have any windows. My only room complaint was that the showers were SOOOO small. How's a girl supposed to shave her legs in such a tiny area? Believe me, it wasn't easy.

The main Centrum area; it was all decorated with tinsel, gingerbread houses, Christmas trees, Santa's sleigh, and reindeer.

This was a pretty chandelier in the Palladium Theater, where we enjoyed lots of comedy shows, music and dancing performances, the Love and Marriage game, and a juggling show.

The Great Gatsby dining room was where we always had dinner. More stories about the folks at our table will follow in a few days.

This is the main pool area, with 4 hot tubs and a million lounge chairs. The first day at sea was super windy. I took a newspaper with me up to deck 10 to do a crossword puzzle while I laid by the pool (we never actually swam in it over the course of the week). Then I put it under my towel, flip flops, shirt and shorts as we watched the belly flop contest, but when that was over my towel was blown over and my paper and pen were no where to be found. Oops.
The Solarium was an adult only pool area with 2 hot tubs and a little cafe. I think we went in the pool for about 5 seconds because it was really cold and salty, so we opted for the toasty waters of the hot tub.

Spencer and I became pros at shuffleboard. Actually... we were terrible, but we had a good time trying. I would usually win when we played by the real rules, and Spencer would always kick my trash when we played by the much easier fake rules that we made up.

We also enjoyed watching the sunsets from the uppermost deck of the Grandeur.