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TAKING CHILDREN ON A CRUISE HELPS FAMILY BONDING

If you are an avid reader of the Sunday newspaper travel sections or are addicted to surfing the web for articles, hints, and recommendations about where to go for your next vacation you have no doubt come across articles about family vacations.

I recommend you consider a family cruise. As an author and novelist I am particularly keen about the Carnival Miracle, a 2,124-passenger luxury ship that is decorated in the literary theme: the likenesses and posters of authors, writers and fictional characters decorate the public areas on this 11-story floating resort. But a little background first.

For more than 30 years my wife and I have almost made a second career out of writing and selling such articles to hundreds of publications. We did our share of land-based trips but it didn't take very long to realize that in our opinion the best family vacation was a family cruise.

Besides the dcor, a Comprehensive Children's Program for Family Vacations and No Trans-Fats Used in Cooking are bonuses.

A big plus to all this is that when our children were young they traveled with us. And I do mean young. Our first cruise article was Traveling With Toddlers' and my wife packed one suitcase with nothing but disposable diapers for our almost two-year old son Timmy. Our daughter Susan was four years older and that age spread added yet another dimension to our articles.

As our children grew we advanced the theme to Cruising (or traveling) With Pre-Schoolers; with Pre-Teens; with Teens: . ..with Young Adults; and a happy mix of similar word-play. Cruising became so routine that when they were young our kinder thought all families took cruises in the summer.

Now those children who gave us so much joy as we watched them discover the pleasures of being exposed to foreign customs, food, sightseeing, etc., are grown and married and remain addicted to cruising.

For a recent September cruise aboard the Carnival Cruise Lines Miracle, during which my wife and I celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary, we discover a larger than expected number of families with 69 children aboard. Inasmuch as schools reopened earlier in the month that was a surprise.

But it shouldn't have been. We had previously cruised on one of Miracle's 3 sister ships, Carnival Pride. Along with Carnival Legend, the four are part of the Carnival Spirit class of floating resorts. We were well aware that Carnival (which now has more than 20 ships at sea) proffered one of the best and

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