Family Time Dining on FOS?

[Antonia]

Anyone have any experience with Family Time Dining? We will be with our son and his wife and 2 children ages 5 & 8. Well the 5 yr old actually turns 6 at the end of the cruise.
We are trying to decide whether to do Adventure Ocean and Family Time Dining.

 

[bumbershoot]

From my experience, MFT is at around 5:30. So it's seating before normal early seating.

And in our experience, and please let me say that we only did this on ONE cruise (it was on Freedom), the AO people meet up outside the restaurant. So with a little kid you'll want to take them out to wherever they meet. DS says that they met upstairs outside the dining room, so looking at deck plans that means they met outside of Isaac Dining Room. I don't know myself b/c DS was 11, and our dinner table companions had a same-age girl who had gone to AO in that way a bunch of times, so he just went with her. Leaving at the time to meet up with the AO employees meant that the kids generally skipped dessert. This was OK for my son because he wanted his Ben&Jerry's after leaving AO anyway, and he knew we would be more generous with that if he had not had dessert at the table. (B&J is a line item in our budget for Royal cruises LOL...it's well worth it!)