Kid Friendly On-Ship Cruising
by Janelle
(Las Vegas, NV)
We took our then 3-year-old son on a 5-day cruise. Before we booked any cruise, however, we first did some research on which cruise line catered more to families with children, and chose to go with Carnival Cruises.
From the beginning of the cruise, we took advantage of almost everything that was offered for his age group. First and foremost, go to the Orientation meeting. Not only will you be able to sign your child up at that time for the children's place, i.e., "Camp Carnival", but you will also get an opportunity to meet all of the childcare workers who will be interacting with your child. We also took a tour of Camp Carnival with our son, and pointed out the toys (that just happened to match the toys we had at home), as well as all the fun things it looked like they had to offer.
The evening before we would get an itinerary of events that would be happening at Camp Carnival, and we went over what we thought would be fun for him. However, as this was a family vacation, we would only leave him there for a couple of hours at a time. We would take him to all of the "fancy" dinners, and the wait staff were more than accommodating to us by offering meals that may be more "kid-friendly". However, we did take advantage of one of the kid-orientated evening meals so that my spouse and I could enjoy a romantic meal together.
There are so many other things to do with a young child on the cruise ships, like swimming, or playing miniature golf. We included him in all of our shore excursions, which meant that we took some of the "easier" excursions, but they were fun nonetheless.
Six months later, our son is still talking about his fun time on the "big boat", and it is most definitely a vacation that we will take again.
