Your experience with the nursery/babysitting?

[Gdes1]

I'd like to hear from other parents who have put their babies in the nursery (I know it's called Flounders on the Magic, not sure what it's called on other ships.)

DD will be 11 months old on our next cruise. We never used the nursery with DS because Grandma was along on that cruise, so I have no experience. I'm a stay-at-home Mom, so my kids aren't used to being left with anyone. It's possible that when DD stays at the nursery, it will be her first time being cared for by someone other than myself, DH, or Grandma.

Anyway, we plan to mostly do things as a family, but I read another post here from a Mom with kids similar in age to mine, and she said that they did main/early dining and asked the server to bring the kids meals first. Then, they dropped the older child at the kids club and took the baby to the nursery and finished their dinner at leisure.

I figure that plan is our only hope for enjoying our dinner, so I'd like to try it. Has anyone else used the nursery, who does not also have their kids in daycare on a regular basis? What are your tips or suggestions? How hard will the staff work to calm a crying baby before they page the parents?

Any other advice is appreciated.

 

[Namsupak]

Our DD has been on DCL at 5mo, 14mo, 16mo, 26mo, 29mo, 30mo, and 31mo. We have used the nursery every time. She does go to day care also. Here is our experience and hopefully some of it is helpful to you. For the first 4 cruises we did late dining. We liked this the best as we would feed her and then drop her off at the nursery. Then we could have an adult dinner to ourselves, including palo. We would usually do room service around 6pm, or even quick service or cabanas/topsiders. This was just to feed her, when she was younger obviously we would feed her the age appropriate food, from bottle then to mashed foods, then to regular food. Then we would drop her off at about 8pm and go to our dinner. We have also tried regular/main dining. When we do this we bring her with us to dinner and we finish up before 8 so we take her to the nursery afterwards and then go do our own adult activities. This has worked out reasonably well as she is older now and can even sit through at least part of a show or a movie.

We tend to like the late dining and have dinner just ourselves at it makes each cruise night like a date night so we actually get to relax instead of wrestling with a little one. Obviously the problem is if you want to see the shows then you need to go to the early show seating and may or may not be able to sit through it with a little one. You can always schedule an earlier nursery time but then the question is how long do you want your child in the nursery. The early dining with her is nice because we do get to see the servers have fun with her and now she is old enough to play back, we can also see the late seating of the shows. The main con is that sometimes dinner is not as relaxed for us if she is being cranky or upset.

To answer your question about the staff, they work very hard with your child. She has been crying when we dropped her off and in the beginning we felt bad but after she got used to it she would ask us to go back. We have actually had her crying when we came to pick her up as she wanted to stay longer. The staff has never called us in 10 cruises and we used the nursery on an almost daily basis, one was the transatlantic 14 nights. They have wave phones now so it is much better than the old paging system, which was basically like my old trauma pager.

I recommend that you try the nursery at least once. Try to keep to your home eating and sleeping schedule, we usually eat dinner about 6-7pm as a family so we tried to keep DD to that schedule no matter the dinner seating we had for ourselves as adults. Make sure to enjoy the cruise yourself. A lot of the times we would do nursery from 8pm to 11pm or 1130pm, that way we could even see the adult cabarets.

I don't recommend someone taking a little leave from dinner to go drop off the kids if you can help it, it just breaks up your experience.

 

[Melcatfish]

We had this situation with our younger daughter on her first cruise although she was slightly older. She had very little experience of being left with someone other than close family.

What works great is the "mirror" window that they have. Our daughter did cry when we dropped her off and the staff asked that we give them chance to calm her down. We went away for a little walk and returned 5 to 10 minutes later and looked through the window. DD was fine by then and couldn't see us looking as the window is a mirror from the inside.

In my experience they tried quite hard to calm upset children and as with all the clubs if they know you are in the spa or Palo enjoying adult time they will really go the extra mile not to disturb you. We were never paged to come and get our daughter from the nursery even though most times we dropped her there she cried. If it hadn't been for that mirror I would have worried that she was miserable but by checking through the mirror I could satisfy myself that those tears were largely for my benefit!!!

Mel
x

PS If you are on the Magic Lisa from Australia and Katie from England were both lovely (as were the other staff but we saw these ladies the most)

 

[Namsupak]

The small world nursery on the Dream does not have the mirror unfortunately. But you can definitely take a step back from the nursery gate to listen for your child, DD usually calmed down within 30 seconds when she figured out there was a plethora of toys to play with or cartoons to watch.

 

[lisagirl88]

We were just on the Dream and put our 2 year old twins in the nursery a few times. I am also a stay at home mom and although they stay with a babysitter occasionally and go in the nursery at church every week they are still "funny" about being left and generally cry. The first time we dropped them off they were both crying and the girl I had to hand them off too seemed generally annoyed about it. However, when I picked them up 2 hours later they seemed in good spirits. The second time we dropped them off the guy working seemed much more into babies/toddlers.

Two things that I didn't like about the nursery:
1. They wouldn't let you past the front gate. I get that this is for security, but I wish I would have gotten to take a tour at some point(they do this at the kids clubs and call it open house, but not sure they did this for the nursery.)

2. They had the TV on every time I picked up. I'm just hoping that they encouraged the kids to do other activites, otherwise that is probably what my son did the entire time. Oh well, I guess, but really the nursery was the only toddler friendly place on the ship(except for Nemo's Reef, but it was windy on our trip)and I wanted them to play instead of watching TV.

All in all the nursery seemed like a great area, the staff seemed great and if I would have been able to have more of a feel of our onboard schedule I probably would have used it for the full 10 hours on our cruise.

 

[bwallace]

Is the nursery in the Magic just a "put em in front of the tv" kind of place?

 

[pouncingpluto]

We used the nursery at 3 months at 8 months. The cast members were great, and it was fun that one of the cast members from our May 2011 Wonder cruise was on our October 2011 Dream cruise-- my DD certainly didn't remember her, but it was nice for us to have that feeling of continuity. We didn't have real problems with crying, but DD would hardly sleep in the nursery, so we couldn't leave her there all that late.

 

[spiiffy]

We sailed the wonder in 2010 with our then 18 mo. He did great in the nursery and we felt wonderful about the CM's. We are cruising in April and he is now 3 1/2 and I am nervous that he will not be in the nursery! This time his 18 mo little brother gets the privilege of the nursery. I have already per booked the allotted hours. I suggest looking at a recent copy of the navigators and schedule some pre nursery time around some activities you want to do with your husband!

 

[spiiffy]

I also wanted to add that my 18 mo did not just get put in front of the tv. They did crafts with him and the characters actually came and played with the toddlers. They took a great pic of my little guy with Pluto and the CM's helped my toddler make a frame and they gave me the picture and frame for free! Such a sweet photo and such a special unexpected memory.