Cruisin'

We went on our first cruise ever in order to celebrate our 5th anniversary.

We started in Long Beach and traveled down the Mexican Riviera. The first two days at sea were so relaxing and just what the doctor ordered. We played miniature golf, swam, read, slept, and played games. Oh, and ate...a lot. Life couldn't get much better for this pregnant lady.

This is the first formal night we had on the ship. For those of you who requested pictures of the baby bump, here it is (though I swear it's grown exponentially the two weeks since then!) I was definitely the most pregnant person on the ship.

The first stop we made was in Puerto Vallarta. Here's our ship, the Carnival Splendor, sitting in the muddy waters because of the previous night's rain storm.

We took an excursion on a boat that took us an hour and a half to the Marieta islands to snorkel and kayak and play on a beach. We saw these pretty dolphins along the way.

Our second stop was in Mazatlan. We took a trolley tour around the island to see all the best sites, including this view of the Sea of Cortez as well as cliff divers who seriously almost hit the rocks below.

We visited the seashell museum which was pretty cool.

And then we took a long walk on the beach. It was the best beach we ended up going to the entire trip (in my opinion) so I was a little sad we didn't get to get in the water this time. But it was just fun to walk along. If I hadn't been pregnant we would have been parasailing this day I think.

We loved the towel animals who greeted us each evening. Room service twice a day to replace our towels and make our bed was heavenly. I wanted to take one of those room service guys home with me as a souvenir.

The last stop was in Cabo San Lucas. We took a water taxi around to see this beauty, El Arco.

This little guy was sitting on the southernmost rock of the Baja Peninsula. I love the yellow submarine in the background.

Here is the cave entrance that they used in the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie.

We got dropped off on Lover's Beach which is on the Sea of Cortez. If you walk about 50 yards the other direction you come out on Divorce Beach. This is in the Pacific Ocean. You can't swim in it because it has the largest, most violent waves we've ever seen. It was crazy.

Lover's Beach sounded like it would be nice and quiet, but it was almost as crazy as Divorce Beach. It was impossible for me to just stand in the waves without getting knocked down and carried off by them.

Joseph was in heaven, though. He'd go jumping off this with the teenage boys into the water below like a crazy kid.

He was missing his boogie board, but he made up for it by body surfing. Here he is waiting for the impending wave.

And this is one second later when the wave caught him and took him away.

He'd body surf all the way up to me and then get up and go again. I couldn't believe how much sand he emptied out of his suit when we got back to the ship. Funny boy.

They let me drive the boat back to our ship for a couple of minutes.

This was our last night of dining, another formal night. I fell in love with all the chilled fruit soup appetizers. One night none of the entrees looked good so I just ordered 4 appetizers, cuz you can do that! It was awesome.

We enjoyed our desserts on the cruise, too. Joseph had a chocolate melting cake almost every night.

Our servers entertained us with a song or dance every evening. Here's our server getting his groove on.

We had such a great time celebrating our 5-year anniversary together. We were so grateful to my Mom for coming down to be with our girls for the week. They had a great time together and I'm pretty sure I missed them a lot more than they missed us. But it was worth it and we are now trying to figure out how we can invite our family and/or friends to come on the next one. Who's in? :)

Happy 5 years, Babe! I love you!