another home port day

January 5, 2013: Ft Lauderdale
Last night was pajama night in Club HAL. We had the usual free hour, then watched Tangled. Some of the kids didn’t want to leave, but others left without saying bye. I’m not sure they all really realized that they weren’t coming up to Club HAL in the morning. I intended to go to the OB with the others not long after we all got off work, but I fell asleep reading and didn’t wake up until around 3am. I didn’t realize that I was that tired!

I had immigration this morning since I embarked last Fort Lauderdale. I was supposed to be in the crew mess at 10:30, so that’s when I got there. I hung out for a bit with the Club HAL people that are leaving (5 of them), then someone told us that they were running behind in immigration, so we had to wait. Club HAL played Jenga for an hour and a half. Finally, they let us go out and we said our goodbyes. I changed and had lunch with Seth, the DJ before going back to the crew mess to use my phone until I had to be at open house. Two kids came to open house while I was there, so Anna let me leave early. Good thing too since I had a coughing attack as I walked out the door so had to run to the bathroom to grab some tissues (my eyes were watering), then to the Lido to get something to drink.

After that, I went downstairs and read until dinner. It was a relatively short dinner since it was very crowded in the Lido and it took 10 minutes to get food, add that to the fact that I was 15 minutes later than normal getting to dinner and I didn’t have a whole lot of time to eat!

Working with the kids was very different than working with the tweens. One kid came right at 7 and we were alone until 8; two others came soon after and that helped a lot because they could play together. There were two boys and a girl. The girl had me read her a story (in my scratchy voice, that was interesting) while the boys kind of played tag. Snacktime at least let me have some certain thing to do for the night so I enjoyed it. The first boy left right after snack, and the girl left not long after. The other boy and I played Cars 2 Monopoly (designed for kids) until he got tired of it. We were both yawning a lot by that point. I suggested a few things to do next and he decided to color. He colored for about a minute before closing the marker and laying his head on the table. He was sound asleep before I knew it. I tried to wake him up to move him to “the bucket” (the room is based on coloring/painting and there’s a ‘bucket of paint’ in the middle of the room with some cushions in it) with no success. Luckily, his dad came ten minutes later and carried him to bed.