Friday, August 14th: My mom shows up to my house. We finish packing up our suitcases: Hers, mine, Babycakes. We make a fresh pot of coffee (half decaf beans, half regular beans, as I'm not "supposed" to have caffeine with my medication, but really, that is impossible.). We decide on which toys to bring, which dresses I look best in, and we are set. We get Jack and Blue Bunny in the car. Everything set? Great! We are off!
The drive to Seattle isn't really that long but it was beautiful. Mostly mountains and trees. It took us just over 6 hours to get there since we stopped at Subway for lunch. In my opinion, they do not offer enough cheese on the vegetarian sandwich and I'm writing a letter to them about it. Anyway, the trip up was pretty fun. My mom and I played an ABC game the ENTIRE time. I think she was going a little nuts from me continueing to beg her to play it more and more, but she humored me. You know the game: You pick a subject - Cities in the US. Then I say, "A is for Atlanta." She says "B is for Boston". I say, "C is for Chicago" and so forth. We did cities, animals, celebrities, politians, alcohol, everything! And we would play two rounds for each theme, that way both of us had to figure out 26 words for each subject. Which one did we have the easiest time with? Desserts. No joke. Those two rounds flew by in seconds.
We show up to Seattle and get our hotel room. We stayed at the lovely Mariott. It really was a nice room. My mom and Jack headed off to bed early. By the time I was ready to go to bed, Jack had taken up 90% of the king sized mattress we were going to share with my mama, so I got to sleep on the little love seat we had in the room. Not cool. That night, Jack woke up with an awful fever. Not just his head, but his entire body. He was actually painful to touch he was so hot. We did what we could to cool him off, and by morning he was totally fine. So, we enjoyed our free continental breakfast, which was amazing by the way,and we were off to the cruise on the beautiful ship, The Norwegein Star.
We show up and there are people at the parking garage who were so helpful. They unloaded us, got our bags, parked the car, everything. We grabbed Babycakes and walked over to the ship. The whole checking in thing is such a pain in the bottom though. Do you have your passport? Where's your tickets? Are you carrying any illegal drugs or bombs? Yada yada yada! Finally we get on board! Jack is pretty blown away by the whole thing. He doesn't know quite what to make of the ship, so we take him on a walk of the entire ship (more like my mom did, I stayed on the deck and took a nap) and then we went to the buffet. After enjoying all-you-can-eat sushi, fries, juice, and a bunch of cake, we get to go to our rooms and settle in. Jack isn't looking so well, so he and I decide to stay in our room and nap while my mom goes up top to enjoy the ship and do the whole farewell to America thing.
Jack and I nap for a few hours. You are probably wondering how I nap so much. Well, it's a big thing for me that I did on the cruise, so, get used to it. After his nap, we head up to the buffet and get more food. Throughout the trip, I mostly ate pizza, french fries, sushi, soft-serve ice cream, bread pudding, and cobbler. Dear lord, if I ever see cobbler again I think I'll die. My body is now made up of 70% water, 29% cobbler, and 1% everything else. Following dinner we all decided to turn in early.
That night Jack woke up and was on fire again. We contemplated on taking him to the ship's doctor. I gave him half of an ibuprofen since I didn't bring any baby Tylenol with me. We covered him in cool towels and my mom stayed up with him throughout the worst of it. Morning came and Jack was ready for breakfast. Since it was a sea day (for all of you non-cruisers, that means a day we don't stop at a port and are just on water sailing), we ate and ate and ate. Jack barely touched his food though. All we could get in him was some OJ and a banana. I felt terrible, I mean, it was his 2nd birthday! His big day, and he felt awful. I took him to the room and he slept. The entire day! I watched 4 episodes of Bones, 4 episodes of Law & Order, and a few other shows I'd never seen before but were fantastic! I've never watched so much TV before in my life. And poor Jack Jack just slept. Thankfully he wasn't hot though. So, sad to say, his 2nd birthday was a bust.
Monday we arrived in Ketchikan, Alaska. The moment I saw it I felt like this is a place I should live. It is the most beautiful little town I've ever seen. Mountains, trees, everything. It reminded me a lot of Eureka, CA. It was raining that day, so we bundled ourselves up and headed into town. My mom had booked herself a trip to tour some naturey stuff but because it was going to be on a little boat, and I don't do little boats, Jack and I decided to tour the town. So after walking around with her for a little bit, she finally had to leave us and we went our separate ways. Jack and I walked around the city for hours. We went to all of the little shops. We got soaked in the rain, but it was surprisingly not that cold. In fact, I ended up having to take off my coat I got so warm. The rain felt great on Babycakes though, and he didn't care how soaked we got. We finally went back to the ship, changed, and met up with my mom at... Yup! You guessed it: The buffet! Now, granted the ship had tons of restaurants we could eat in but the buffet was just so much quicker and easier with Jack. There is no way we could have gotten him to sit through an entire dinner at a restaurant. At least in the dining hall there were other kids running around so I wasn't the only mom who had no control over her wild child.
That night, my mom noticed Jack was developing a rash on his face. Being the hypochondriac that I am, she says the worst thing possible, "Hmm, I wonder if he has the measles or chicken pox!" So I get into a panic mode thinking my child is going to die even though he is all up to date on his vaccinations. It was a rough night for me. But, Jack slept really well and didn't get hot again, so I was happy.
Here are pictures from days 1, 2, & 3. Stay tuned for tomorrow's blog: Juneau and the ice glaciers!
This was a cake they had!
Me and My Mom play the ABC game! only we call it the ironing game because for some reason we always played it while she was ironing in the dining room, we still play it to this day!
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