Couples Only Cruise ~ Really ?!?

Time passed exceedingly slowly, as it always does when I’ve got a secret. I made sure that I filled out medical release forms for my dear mother in law, just in case she needed to get the kids treated for anything while we were out of the country. 

Casey and Chris got their cruise details nailed down and called to double check that they could stay with us the night before the cruise. Ben plopped on the couch and asked about which cruise they were taking.  I told him that some of the eight night cruises in spring 2013 got split into four night cruises to Cozumel. I also let him know there were some really good deals on them.  Ben replied in a way I never expected from my calm predictable husband.



“Hey, maybe we should do one too!” Now realize at this point we only needed to wait six weeks until our Thanksgiving cruise. In another six months after that we would be cruising on our eight night cruise to the kingdom and that we’d always been extremely conservative with money. I managed to distract him with talk of the kids’ school and other things, quite thankful that he hadn’t asked about our rewards dollars.

I will never sneak around behind his back like this again.  It just isn’t worth going prematurely grey.
I worked on FE gifts and started getting to know all of the awesome people in my group.  I ordered my FE (which is awesome, BTW) and snuck that into the house under cover of darkness.

In mid-October banner advertisements arrived in malls across Texas heralding the arrival of the Disney Cruise Line in Texas.



One of my acquaintances from the Y is the wife of one of my husband’s coworkers.  Our husbands used to be in the same department and occasionally carpool, but corporations being what they are, have since split into other groups. She helped out by getting my husband’s current supervisors contact information from her husband (as I couldn’t exactly ask him for that without raising suspicion). 

“Hey honey, can I have your direct supervisor’s phone number and email address? Oh and when is the best time for me to talk to them when you aren’t around their office?”

Yeah.  I think he’d get that something weird was going on.

Anyway, Joan scheduled Ben for (entirely fictitious) corporate training noted in his schedule as VIM (“Vacationing Is Mandatory”). Ben mentioned it to me once, but remained so busy, as did his supervisor, that they never really had a chance to talk about it in private, and she assured him they’d revisit his various conference schedules after the holidays.

Thankfully, he didn’t get too suspicious and my Y friend, her husband, Ben’s supervisor and Ben’s parents all kept the secret. Casey and I chatted on Facebook and texted as we got more and more excited about our upcoming cruises.

Around mid-December I started getting concerned…I couldn’t think of anything to give Ben for Christmas that wouldn’t give it away entirely. 

So I decided I would tell Ben in my own weird way right on Christmas, and let him know in advance that it would be for Christmas and our anniversary and his birthday all together. I love DISigning in my free time so I made a ticket booklet in the style of the old Disney Ticket books.

Except instead of the first ticket saying “Welcome to Walt Disney World and the Magic Kingdom” it read as follows…

Welcome to V I M

Yes, The “VIM”

you’ve been

Wondering About

VIM or “Very Important Meeting” is an acronym that your supervisor used as a placeholder to keep you from getting booked between February 5^th and February 8^th until Christmas, after which it will be changed to vacation time.

By the way, Joan, Tanya and Ryan say “Hi

I printed each on a different color of cardstock, bound them together and wrapped it up for his Christmas gift. Ben waited until Christmas morning to open his present, rather than opening it the evening before.  The kids busily roamed the house racing their remote control cars and singing in the new Hello Kitty karaoke machine.

Ben opened the tickets.  Read them, reread them and then finally got it.

And said “Really?!?”

I said “Yes.”

I had finally surprised him.
This post is Part Two in an Ongoing Trip Report Couples Only Cruise.