This cruise was a total mixed bag of both good and bad. We chose this cruise because we had not seen Alaska in a long time, and Royal Caribbean had received many kudos for being the best cruise for babies. (We have a 15-month-old). So we went with the "Rhapsody of the Seas." We were able to board just fine at 1130. Got to our room to find twin beds and a collapsed Pack-n-play tossed on the floor. We contacted our housekeeping service and were told that someone would be by to fix our room. We ended up roomless until 5pm, thanks to the mix-up and the mandatory lifeboat drills. Our son was a tired mess by then, since we couldn't find a quiet place to have him nap and we had no room. Overall a rough start. The staff in the buffet were great, though.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR PARENTS WITH YOUNG CHILDREN: The hallways and doorways are very narrow. Your average-sized Graco stroller will barely clear through the door of your stateroom. Most of the time you will not be able to get through the hallways easily due to housekeeping carts and fellow passengers. If you can manage with an umbrella stroller, you will be better off. Especially since your stroller will take up most of the free space in your room, and will take up about half of your closet space when folded.

The "Royal Babies" program on Rhapsody is a joke. They only do it once a day for 45 minutes, and it is not a program, but a play group with some used toys out of a suitcase in a hallway lounge at 9am. Let me put this in perspective... To have my child and me dressed, fed, changed, and in any sort of mood to play by 9am means that we would have to get up around 7am. Who wants to get up at 7am on a cruise????? So we ended up missing out on all the play groups but one. Our toys to check out were random pillow case sacks of small, cheap toys. You do not get to pick the toys, they just hand you a sack. There are no enclosed areas for toddlers on this ship. There is a kid's room, but it is for potty-trained children ONLY. Same goes for the pools. So most of our time was spent in our stateroom or else with my son stuck in a stroller, since he couldn't really walk yet. He got tired of that, as did we. I ended up taking him to the cardroom to play, since it was one of the few places he could crawl safely on the ship where there were no glass coffee tables to bang his head, and few people used the space. Read more