Super Savings Saturday: The “I-Didn’t-Cook-Clean-or-Shop” Edition

Those who are frequent readers here may have noticed I was rather absent last week. That’s because I spent all week with my husband on a cruise!

As I’ve mentioned before, we purposefully chose to go on a very inexpensive honeymoon because we knew Jesse was going to be going to law school soon after we got married. We’d both agreed that if we made it through law school debt-free and paid cash for a house by the time I was 30, we’d save up to go on a cruise. But I’d sort of assumed this was just one of those dream vacations which would never actually become reality.

So I shoved the idea to the back of my brain and pretty much forgot about it.

But Jesse didn’t and near the end of 2010, he completely shocked me by telling me he had a big surprise for me. I was baffled as to what it could be and totally giddy when he presented me with two different cruise vacation options.

Since we’d never traveled outside the U.S. before, never been on a cruise ship and never left all of our children, this was a really big deal (you moms with young children can likely empathize). In fact, just to make me feel better and more at ease, we actually left our children in December for two and half days as a trial run while Jesse and I went to Branson together. They survived beautifully and we truly had a wonderful time.

So, early last Sunday morning, we boarded a plane for Florida, leaving our three young children in the able care of our wonderful mother’s helper, and took off for our “Second Honeymoon” Cruise.

While I missed the children so much, it was really wonderful to be away with my husband — by ourselves. With no phone and little internet access, no dishes to wash, no meals to make, no diapers to change, no laundry to do, no children to wake us up in the night and basically no agenda but to just have fun and enjoy one another.

It was absolutely wonderful, though very weird. I realized that I hardly know what to do with myself without a long to-do list (not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing)! We experienced all sorts of firsts and we soaked up every minute of it, got lots of time to talk through goals and areas in our lives we want to improve, we took hundreds of pictures and we laughed harder than we’ve laughed in a very long time.

We are so thankful to our mother’s helper, Jesse’s assistant and the wonderful MoneySavingMom.com team who covered all the bases at home so we could be gone this past week. We’re indebted to each of them and could never have had such a relaxing vacation without their help!

And now, back to reality and our regularly scheduled programming here.

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