I have received some requests for information about life on the ship, so for those who care, here is the latest from the MV Explorer.
I am surprised at how excited I am to be sailing again. Living on a ship has unlocked a new place in my soul for the sea. Something about the wide open space, the blue water, the endless sky, the colors of sunrise and sunset ... these things will forever be a part of me now. I never knew how much my heart would sing on the ocean.
Everyone on the ship is very friendly, and it feels like we know or at least recognize just about everyone now. We meet up with folks for meals, cards (Nerts), sitting by the pool, going to church, playing ping pong, or working side by side in the computer lab. It's feeling more and more like a family all the time.
Our boys are celebrating their birthdays on this voyage. Having a birthday at sea is a special event. For Austin's, we got a huge ice cream cake delivered to the Ship Kids' meeting in the afternoon, and all 22 of the children gathered around and sang to him. Then, after the cake, we all went up to the 7th deck for the Austin Knott 10th Birthday Party Ping Pong Invitational. Charlie worked out a bracket, and all the kids played until the final game which featured (not surprisingly): Austin vs. Charlie. Charlie won by a hair, but Austin didn't mind, and everyone had a great time! Charlie's birthday is March 5th, so we're getting ready for that.
After being in some exotic locales, the food on the ship seems more appealing. They serve lots of stir fries with rice, pasta with different kinds of sauce, always soup and salad, and usually cake for dessert. When they have grapes, Asian pears, or mandarin oranges, it's an exciting day! Right after Singapore, they had a BBQ night, which was truly monumental and cause for much celebration. They set up grills on the pool deck and brought buffet tables outside, laden with mac-n-cheese, fresh fruit, potato salad, and... drum roll, please... hamburgers and BBQ ribs! I have never seen the kids eat so much. The head of the dining hall told me they budget twice as much for BBQ night because people eat so much food! I'm hoping they do another one before the trip is over.
Our kids' room has become the hang-out spot for all the children on the ship. At any given time there are 8-12 kids in there, listening to the shipboard music station rather loudly, playing video games on their kindles, painting fingernails, making yarn bracelets, or prank calling the college kids. Whenever they call our room, we answer with different names like, "Captain's Desk," or "Ship Security," and often a flustered child will quickly hang up. Last week, the kids started going door-to-door and asking the college kids for candy. Sort of like trick-or-treating at sea. We didn't approve of such begging, so in Myanmar, my kids bought lollipops to sell on the ship. Charlie was up to $10 in profit when the dean of the ship found out about it and put the kibosh on his business. The Dean's Memo the next day read: "As a reminder, solicitation on the ship is prohibited, especially concerning candy and clothes." The kids have now decided to start a bartering system where they trade candy with the college kids or -- if they can get their hands on one of those jackets with pockets on the inside lapels -- they may go underground and sell on the black market. I'll keep you posted.
We're learning a lot of lingo on the ship. In academia, we've found, you sit around a lot and discuss ideas, issues, and most of all, feelings: how you feel about yourself; how you feel about others; how you feel about your identity; how you feel about how others feel about your identity, and so on. We've learned it's important that we all have safe spaces in which to discuss our feelings and have others validate them. We now often use terms like "micro-aggression," as in, "Charlie, don't give me that look -- that's a micro-aggression." In all seriousness, I heard that word for the first time in a meeting where someone up front apologized publicly to someone else. When I missed the reason, I asked Kerry and he said, "That guy asked that girl what her name was. That was a micro-aggression. Apparently, it actually was. So, if I ever fail to ask your name, know that I am just trying not to "micro-aggress you" (as my children say), and I really do validate how you feel about how I feel about how you feel.
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