Hi all! I’m new to this board and wanted to introduce myself. My husband and I are Americans living in London with a 3.5 year old. We’ve been on a couple of Carnival cruises, mostly recent one was 4 years ago, so none since our son was born. We have our first Royal Caribbean cruise coming up in September, 7 night Greek Isles from Venice on the Rhapsody.
I've been lurking here for a few weeks and have searched past posts, but I haven't seen too much specific to cruising with toddlers/pre-schoolers, so that's what most of my questions relate to.
1. Adventure Ocean -- I think you guys more than most would understand our complete joy and relief that in the last couple of weeks my son has finally turned a corner on potty training! Of course when I booked this cruise ages ago, I purposely chose a date after my son would have turned 3 so he could make full use of the pool and Adventure Ocean, naively thinking that he would of course be potty trained by 3. But after wrecking our nerves and making us consider cancelling altogether, I think he will go into the cruise about as potty trained as you could hope for a 3 year old to be (poop smears notwithstanding)! So, my question is...the past posts I’ve seen about 3 year olds in Adventure Ocean all indicated that people only left their kids for a limited time, checking in on them regularly and/or picking them up after 2/2.5 hours. Our son does full days in nursery 3x a week, and he’s pretty sociable and adventurous, and loves to stay up late and party, so I think he’d be fine staying longer/later. But I’m also worried he’ll be the only young’un left hanging past 10 pm and might get lonely/we might look like crazy parents. Anyone here drop their 3 year old off at Adventure Ocean for longer periods? How’d they do?
2. Dinner -- I had intended to eat in the main dining room for most of our evening meals with My Time Dining. Is this typical or do people with young kids often just go with Windjammer? (I don't think we'd get much from the speciality dining so haven't planned for that).
3. Excursions with young kids -- We picked this itinerary for the ports and want to make the most out of them with excursions. I don't feel I get much out of just walking around ports aimlessly. Is it fairly common for young kids to join their families on excursions, or is that considered poor form? We will try to keep him quiet/behaving, but with toddlers you just never know.
4. Excursions generally (finally not kid-specific!) -- there isn't a wealth of information and reviews out there about Royal Caribbean’s excursions on this itinerary (ports: Kotor, Corfu, Piraeus/Athens, Mykonos, Argostoli). If you have done any of the official excursions at any of these ports I’d love your thoughts on dos and don'ts.
Thanks!