Welcome! Julie already briefly explained, but I will try to give you a little more detail. As Julie said the FE is an exchange of little gifts between a group of people. We each purchase or make small gifts to give to each cabin. In ours, we have no limit to what you can spend, that way anyone can share the magic, some will spend more, some less, but it doesn't matter, sometimes it the thought that goes into the gift that counts. There is a fish that hangs outside your cabin door that were origianlly used to leave notes on. Now, we use those fish to hang something with pockets(extending the fish, thus the FE name) and the people on the list will deliver what they made to you. Each day someone is assigned a time slot to deliver to make sure we had everyday covered, then the latecomers have been assigned an any time any day delivery. Everyone on the list will deliver to the cabins on the list on the day they were assigned, and will be getting deliveries from everyone else .The people in green signed up after our original cutoff for a full participation, which was a week after we hit the 75 day mark, June 21st. Now anyone that joins may not get deliveries from every cabin, as people have ordered/or bought supplies to make items. I have heard from quite a few saying they did have extras for any late comers, so I know you will still get a bunch of dleiveries, I just can't guarantee all 30 cabins delivering to yours. The people in green have accepted those terms and are now part of our group. There are a couple of threads on the main
DCL board about FE gifts, and if you check on the main DCL board one of the first posts at the top of the page, you will see the FAQ section, click there, scroll down til you see the FE and there are pictures and directions to make your own FE or you can buy one off of ebay. Gifts can range anywhere to homemade scrapbook pages, christmas ornaments, magnets, pencils, oriental trading items, candy, something from your state, disney gifts of any kind...and the list goes on, just use your imagination. You can make/buy one gift for everyone in the cabin, one gift per cabin, a gift just for the kids, or as I am doing one gift for the adults, and then every child in the room will get an individual gift, it is up to you. If your are signing up and don't have enough posts to pm me, just post it in this thread. I am usually on everyday and will add you to the list.
We will be taking no one else after the Aug 9th date, we have people leaving early for an extra week in the parks before hand and they need time to get their stuff together before they leave, so the earlier you decide the better for people who are now preparing their gifts. If you have any other questions, or still don't understand something, please let me know.
We also have a verandah room and love it. It is the same room we had our last cruise. DH and boys loved watching us dock at CC and all the activity, and when we were in Cozumel, they thought it was really funny watching people run for the ship right before we left. We watched beautiful sunsets and saw dolphins swimming along side the ship one night, and I watched several sunrises since I am an early riser. Dh and I did a cruise in April with just a porthole, and really missed our balcony, spent that whole trip wishing we had splurged on it, but that is because we had just had a verandah. It is a personal choice, if it is worth the extra money to you. If you've never had it, you probably wouldn't miss it, if you have done it before, you would probably miss it more like we did.