Carnival Freedom for 11 mo

[Woodmnky]

We had a wonderful vacation planned on RCI Freedom of the Sea including having booked a Family Promendade Stateroom, but then reality hit. We are just getting used to having another family member (DS) and to me not working to stay home with DS and we just couldn't justify dipping that far into our savings for a vacation.

 

That brings me to this point where we are looking for something less expensive with the idea that any vacation is better than no vacation:).

 

We are considering a 6 day Western Carib sailing on Carnival Freedom. I am aware that there is no pool for DS and that most kid options are limited, but I am looking to find out what there is. A little about us, I stay home with DS so being with him 24/7 is nothing new. I don't leave DS with babysitters while at home, so I expect that I would probably leave him little to none while on a ship even if this was offered. That being said, are there things to do as a family, what is offered that an under 1yo can participate in?

 

Thanks for the help.

[Woodmnky]

I didn't get any responses, but that's OK. I didn't realize that we had a couple of unused Future Cruise Credits on Princess, so when we apply these this is pretty much the least expensive option and we know exactly what we are getting. Not much for kids, but I will post what I do find when I get back.

[Tggrtoes]

We took our son on Princess when he was 16 months and we had a great time. It was EXHAUSTING because we pretty much RAN after him the entire week non stop, but we made some great memories. I would suggest getting a balcony room if you can possibly squeeze it from the budget, so you and DH can have some alone time when DS is napping. We just brought a baby monitor and had our date there. We even splurged one morning and got the balcony brunch thing and pretended we were on a romantic date while DS was playing nearby. :p

[Woodmnky]

We took our son on Princess when he was 16 months and we had a great time. It was EXHAUSTING because we pretty much RAN after him the entire week non stop, but we made some great memories. I would suggest getting a balcony room if you can possibly squeeze it from the budget, so you and DH can have some alone time when DS is napping. We just brought a baby monitor and had our date there. We even splurged one morning and got the balcony brunch thing and pretended we were on a romantic date while DS was playing nearby. :p

Unfortunately, we can't get a balcony but that is not really an issue. My lovely energetic 9mo only naps for about an hour and a half each day and usually I am so exhausted that I sleep too :). Even before kids we were early to bed people, so other than running a marathon chasing DS not much should be different. I didn't realize until yesterday that Princess would let us go into the kids club with DS to play. That is really cool as I wasn't too keen on leaving him in any club/nursery anyways.

[Tggrtoes]

Ah, how could I forget going to the kids club? We spent quite a bit of time in there (there were only certain times we could go in there though) and had a great time. They had tons of fisher price toys (we even borrowed a few) and let us do a t-shirt painting craft and they had a CD Player with fun music going, so we played freeze dance quite a bit. The one we were on (Sapphire Princess) had small playground equipment outside on a little closed in balcony area as well as a small kids pool (although I didn't know at the time that even that was probably not CDC approved for non potty trained kids - but only babies were using it since it was accessible only from the kids club).

 

Because there aren't as many kids on Princess (at least when we went which was off-season), we seemed to get extra special treatment from all the crew/staff. You'll have a great time!