Thread: Share Your Secrets to a Great Family Cruise

Every family does things a little differently on a cruise. I thought I'd go ahead and start family cruising suggestions and secrets.

The main seating worked out well for us as DD just couldn't have possibly stayed up for the second seating.

Your kids may want to spend all their time in the kids club, but make sure that you do things together as a family too. We had a day where we played board games, and DD and I did hula lessons together. DS and DH had a great time playing ping pong together.

Make your kids go to the prodcution shows if they are old enogh to be well behaved. They are generally G rated, and they love all the music and the costumes. We had to make them come to Celebrate the World and they loved it. We may not have to make them next time.

Another thing we did was aske them to try one new food a day, and also we asked them to order off the main menu at dinner and not the children's menu. They were 7 and 9, and certainly the stuff on the main menu was not too exotic for them. They loved trying new food and ordering what ever they wanted from the grown up menu.

So those are just a few of my ideas, I'm sure there are others that do things differently when they take their kids, so share what worked or didn't work for you.

We take our kids and grandkids, and the Grandkids want to hang with us alot!! We include them from the beginning!! We look at pics, ports that they will be visiting, they look them up on the computer, they are aware that ports could be cancelled, so they aren't dissapointed if it happens, They check out the kids area and see things that interest them, They see the dining room and everything I can find to show them, and they bring a journal for their friends at home, and we discuss rules before they board!! We shop for cruise clothes, and there is nothing on this earth as kool as seeing everything on a ship from a child's eye!!

We have been taking our girl to the ship's shows ever since her first cruise at 23 months old. We'll ask her if she wants to go and she only says no if she's tired (which means we all go back to the cabin as it's not fair to her or others in the audience). After participating in a musical theater camp last summer, she now has an appreciation for the work that goes into the shows. This year, her camp will be doing Grease so we watched the movie last night. She recognized some of the numbers from the shows she went to on her last two cruises (one was a Broadway tribute and the other a 50s tribute).

While packing on this last cruise, I brought out several choices for her cruise wardrobe; she appreciated getting to pick out what I packed for her.

Well for me this means extended family.
I think the most important thing is that we have all agreed that we do not have to be joined at the hip so to speak.
We all enjoy different types and levels of activities, so our cruise is individualized to our own likes and needs.
No hard feelings and no feeling guilty or left out.

Although each family is different, I can tell you what we do. We have time on the ship when we do things as a family but most of the time we let them do kids things and just make sure we know where they are and that they are within our sights. At ports we do everything as a family just for safety reasons.