Overall we had a good time. We travel quite a bit so initially the idea of cruising for us was all about not having to pack and repack with a very squirmy toddler in tow. As others from our cruise will no doubt say, we were VERY fortunate to have incredibly sunny weather and the Hubbard glacier viewing was beautiful and tragic. I say tragic because you can see how much the glacier had receded and how much ice melting is going on. With all the global warming, and tourism is a part of it, I felt we were witnessing a massive environmental change in one of the most pristine wilderness land mass.

We are first time cruisers and we knew that drop off daycare on most ships are unavailable for un-potty trained 2 year olds. However, the in cabin babysitting which we used only once was a great benefit-- Tracy in the Kids program was great especially since our toddler was screaming when we left, despite our efforts to get him to go to sleep (9:30 pm Alaska time) I could go on an on about cruising with toddler but you really need to check out www.tdyfamilytravel.com for the details.

The short story is that Celebrity has a new policy where one person from the youth program stays with your kid AND one additional female from housekeeping also stays in the cabin. The night we had babysitting we dined at the Olympic where we enjoyed a better value-priced/greater variety wine list but the food I think was just a little better than Metropolitan dining. Our pager went off, my DH went to check on the kid who finally had his last tantrum and Tracy and the woman from housekeeping were sitting in the dark cabin. My DH felt bad for them and of course we tipped them but with all the anxiety around getting to know your babysitter and process, acclimating our kid to Tracy and the cabin, and booking/scheduling, it just wasn't worth it to us to do it again, esp since we could count on the fact that we'd be paged or would cave into our anxiety to check on him. Read more