Day Twenty: Fun Daytime, Annoying Nighttime

This morning we decided to go play volleyball at Snorkel Park. When I got outside to meet everyone, it was just me and Crocs. Cupcake and Popsicle arrived a short while later, so we grabbed lunch, called Lollipop and Kiwi and told them to meet us there, and headed for the beach. If you were not already aware of this, I am not a very good volleyball player. That may come as a shock to some of you, but it’s true. We played for about an hour before deciding that a game of two on two with me being half of a team was enough. I did come really close to the ball a few times and I had a couple of good ducks.

It was sprinkling which made it a little cooler, but we decided to go in the water to cool off a little more. It was quite refreshing for the bottom part of my legs, but that was it. It was EXTREMELY cold. By this time, the rest of our volleyball players showed up. It started raining harder, so we decided that beach time was over. Rather than head immediately back to the ship, we went by the Bermuda Rum Cake Factory and Glass Blowing. It was really neat there. I didn’t buy anything yet, but I will for sure have to get some rum cake and at least a glass ladybug!

When we got back to the ship, we made a visit to the spa. It was a blast with 6 of us lounging in the jacuzzi. After we had been in there for a while, we went to the pool that’s in the spa where we did flips, handstand contests, and even played Marco Polo. I never would have guessed that I would be 25, on a cruise ship, in the spa, and playing Marco Polo. Since we were back on ship early, I was able to veg out and take a nap before I had to get ready for program.

Tonight was Bollywood night. The show is pretty cool, especially the acrobatic stuff. I had a 2-year old on my lap who had been dropped off lateish and was crying as he always does when he gets dropped off. He really enjoyed the show, but his 8-year old brother who was sitting next to us had other comments about it. Now, his dad had already told us earlier in the week that he was their “prude son” and would not let them eat at Aqua because there were naked people on the walls. About 10 minutes into the hour long show, he asks me if it’s almost over. About 5 minutes later, he tells me that his parents wouldn’t want him to see it if they had known it would be like this. I told him it was fine and they saw what the show was in the program of events.
*NOTE: The show does have a lot of belly dancing, and women in bra tops and extremely high cut bottoms. But it’s a cruise ship. That’s how all of the shows are.*
The lead girl came out again in some scandalous costume, and Criofan (pronounced “Griffin.” Seriously? Could his parents be any meaner?), looked at me again. I told him that if there was something he shouldn’t see he could just close his eyes. Well the girl is pulled up on a rope, part of her costume is ripped away, and they do one of those cirque acts where she is being spun around at an amazing rate of speed by some man standing on the floor. Criofan leans over to me and says, “I’m just watching the guy on the floor spinning the rope because I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to see her butt.” He is far too concerned with all the nakedness for his own good. I decide to put an end to the whole thing by saying, “it’s just like she’s wearing a bathing suit.” Luckily, he accepted that and we moved on.

When we got upstairs to program after the show, we were supposed to go to the Teen Disco for a dance party. This ended up being my worst work experience so far. The kids came in and started playing all the games around the room. I had been told to start with the dance party and then let them play games if it didn’t work. Well, the other two YCs at the time didn’t enforce that as we entered, so it was a little hard to get it all started. It started off okay with a lot of them dancing, but the novelty wore off quickly. So Rainbow Fish set up the chairs to play musical chairs. After talking, at length, with Lego about this, I think that was the beginning of my crankiness. We have a boy in our group who is in a wheelchair. How do you play musical chairs if you are in a wheelchair? Before we started the game and told the kids what we were doing, I pulled Rainbow Fish over and told her my concern. Her response was that we couldn’t change every single activity because of one child {I didn’t want to change every activity. Just the one that required standing, walking, and then sitting.} and used a child with autism as an example. If we have a child with autism, we aren’t going to cancel the activity because they won’t like it {I would probably shy away from doing activities involving loud noises or other possible triggers if I had a child with autism.}. My response to that was while a child with autism might not want to do an activity and might choose not to participate, he would at least have an opportunity to do it. Wonic (yes, Wonic) wasn’t going to even have that chance. We needed to have some way he could participate. It ended up that he came into the DJ booth and got to start and stop the music. After we had played a couple of times and the kids were bored with it, I started to get them ready for Chubby Bunny, the other game that Rainbow Fish had already gotten the supplies for. Well, it turns out that we weren’t going to play after all because Lego was afraid of the kids choking on the mini marshmallows instead of the big ones and we wouldn’t have enough for the 3 teams I had split the teams into. When Rainbow Fish came back, I asked if we had any of the jumbo marshmallows left but we didn’t because they had all been eaten. By the YCs. I said that we could have had them start out with the big ones and then add the small ones, but I was told to “Relax.” I lost it at this point. I said I’d go relax somewhere else because it wasn’t worth it to me having all the kids stand around wanting to know what we were doing next when we weren’t even supposed to be running the activities. Needless to say, the rest of the evening in program sucked with us trying to figure out what to do and how to fix things. We did end up discussing all the conflicts between not planning, not communicating, and not being on the same page, but I was still cranky when Lego and I went for our late night snack. I decided that the Crew Bar would be a good place to go for part of the evening and had a good time. I also found out that next week I’m going to be working with the Teen Group with Popsicle. That made me excited. We’ll see how it turns out!