Cruise and AK's Big Day!

First of all, Mark and I would like to say a HUGE thank you to the Smiths for taking such great care of our kids so that we could go and enjoy celebrating 15 years of marriage! What a blessing to know that we were leaving them with people they love and have so much fun with! Mallory took some incredible pictures of the kids and had them waiting when we arrived! What a treat to take home such great pictures-you will be seeing some of them as our Christmas card pictures!:)

Now, to the cruise! It was raining when we left Port Canaveral, so we couldn't take any pictures leaving, but here we are at dinner the first night.

 Spent $7 on the nickel slots. We are high rollers! But we were such dorks- everytime we walked thru the casino to get to the theater, we looked for dropped money! Only found one forgotten quarter in a machine.

 In our room being cheesy!

 The first day we got off at CoCo Cay- Royal Caribbean's private island. This is our ship as we were taking a boat to the island.

 It was a great island! The water was crystal clear and we walked down the beach about a mile at least. We saw a bunch of huge shells with snail-like things living in them, a huge living starfish, a sting ray, and a bunch of long see thru fish all around our feet as we were walking. It was so relaxing to walk and just sit and talk and sleep and eat!

 We took a nap on this hammock.

 Leaving to go back to the ship.

 A view of the island from the small boat.

 We sat here and did lots of people watching!

 Formal dinner night.

 Getting off the boat at Nassau. We took an excursion to Atlantis on Paradise Island.

 We could go to the aquarium and use the beaches, but not the pools. It has several neat aquariums to walk thru.

 Below was a HUGE monterey.

 The colors of the fish were amazing! The jellyfish below reminded us of all the ones we saw on the beach in Florida several years back- except not blue!

 Mark snorkeling. We saw lots of the same fish we saw in the aquarium right off of the beach.

 I took a few pictures of the room so the kids could see what it looked like and how small it was.

 We had a great wait staff and picked their tables every night. Ronald- from the Phillipines and holding up the peace sign, was going home in a couple of days. They work 7 months on, 2 months off. He commented that his kids grow up when he is not there. Sad, but they have to make money for their families back home. But he was very cheerful and happy to serve us. The waiter in the middle was Immade and he was from Indonesia. We had fun cutting up with these two.

 We had such a great time and were so blessed to get to go! Had a few glitches on the way home. It took us 12 hours to get home because of 2 broken planes, but thankfully we were so relaxed that we just went with the flow!

 Toby is our resident dead bug catcher. He likes to clean up the HUGE dead water bugs!

 Well, we were getting gifts for the kids on our trip and decided to get AK a pair of earrings! She is so very responsible and such a BIG help to Shelby and Toby at home and at the Smith's that we decided to reward her with getting her ears pierced a little earlier than we had previously decided. I cried as she opened the box and realized what the earrings meant!

 Marking the spots for the holes.

 Getting them pierced! She said it hurt worse than I said it would (it's been a long time since I had that done!), but she was beaming ear to ear!

 Shelby took her money and secretly bought AK some horse earrings! So sweet!

After being in Claire's for a long time, Mark took Toby to Sears to "see where real men shop".