Food

Raising Roo: Flying With a Carry-on Baby (Part 2)

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…When the time for boarding finally came, Alex and I gave each other a quick pep-talk, sent a prayer to a god we don’t believe in, and strapped Roo to my chest in a baby carrier. 

This setup kept him happy for all the time it took to queue, scan our tickets, and make our way to the crowded gangway where we immediately came to a halt while the slow procession of passengers crawled into the confines of the plane. Stuck in the overpopulated metal tube, Roo vented the frustration we were all feeling and began to cry. Thankfully, as previously mentioned, my wife is an organisational queen and within seconds of his first sooky croak she had a tupperware container full of snacks out and three rice crackers stuffed into his tiny fist. As is so often the case with all of us, food turned his mood upside down and he was soon happily munching away while making eyes at anyone who looked his way.

Boarding further fed his need for attention as we picked our way down the aisle through the seated passengers, who, in desperate need of anything to distract them from their immediate discomfort, found the image of a little person strapped to a big person’s chest greatly entertaining. We moved down the length of the plane in a wave of smiles, partners tapping each other to point out the toddler at chest-height, and assurances of Roo’s cuteness from little old ladies who gave his foot a squeeze in passing like a worshipper grazing the fingers of a tiny cult leader.

We seated ourselves and, after three years of flightless lockdown, the illusion of the joy of flying that we had held in our heads was shattered as we instantly recalled just how little legroom a passenger is allotted. The sense of claustrophobia was only amplified by the baby on our lap who, in some weird M.C. Escher twisting of space, also didn’t have enough leg room despite his legs being the length of cucumbers. 

We were approached by a stewardess who provided a baby seatbelt and inquired if we were familiar with how it worked. I demonstrated through the carrier that I was well-versed in strapping my child to my body and we buckled Roo in, Alex’s turn this time, and then attempted to keep him that way and not squirming onto the young man who had the misfortune to be seated in the third seat of our row. 

We idled on the tarmac and Alex and I got to work jiggling keys, pulling faces, singing songs, plucking out vomit bags from the seat pocket to play with, and pointing out everything and anything that might serve to hold Roo’s interest for longer than thirty seconds. We were the jesters to the young prince and this juggling of distractions kept his lordship happy up until the big moment: take off.

Demonstrating once again that she is a force of forethought, my wife had prepared what is essentially a porous pacifier full of fruit that forces the infant to chew and suck in order to get the tasty treat into their mouth, meaning that as we elevated and the pressure shifted, Roo’s jaw was working hard, thereby avoiding the pressure build up inside his ears. Our little man was smiling and satisfied the whole way up, entirely unaware that he had just risen to a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. 

Once we were up, we de-tensed a little, able to unbuckle our boy and pull out a tablet to mesmerise him with bright and colourful moving images. Roo climbed our bodies like ladders, peeking over our shoulders and some of the nearby passengers took over the load of providing entertainment, smiling and waving and falling under Roo’s cheeky spell.

Then the unthinkable, but what we prayed for to any god listening prior to boarding, happened. Roo leant back against me, Alex angling the tablet towards his eyeline, and he remained still. We held our breaths, equally as still as our son, and shared shocked glances as Roo’s eyelids drooped, and drooped further, then sprang open, then eased closed, and stayed that way. The patron saint of parents had answered our prayers and delivered up the holy grail of mid-flight transit possible scenarios – our baby slept. 

Our natural instinct was to holler and high-five, but we managed to restrain ourselves and instead whispered words of praise and congratulations to each other. While they gave no sign of the momentous event that had just occurred, I’m sure our neighbouring passengers were silently sharing in the victory. 

We spent the next thirty minutes grinning silently at each other and whispering how great we were at the whole parenting game while Roo dozed merrily on and we careened ever closer to Athens. My arm grew steadily more and more numb but I embraced the pins and needles, reasoning my limb was the sacrifice needed to appease the patron saints of parents and, if so, then it was a reasonable price to pay. 

Then, from down the aisle, we spotted the trolley. The metal cart jangled and clanked as it was pushed down the narrow thoroughfare, the too-smiley stewardess behind it speaking bubbly and loudly over the roar of the engines. We scrambled for a polite way to indicate for her to leave us the hell alone but any attempt at deflection would have meant matching her in volume and so, instead, we smiled as she approached and begged her with our eyes to be quiet. She provided the lunch options for the flight in her loud, syrupy voice and we whispered our responses and tensed around our boy, as if somehow we could cocoon him from all disruptions through sheer exertion.

The stewardess eventually trundled on and both our sets of eyes darted over Roo’s face, which remained soft and doll-like and asleep. We sagged back into our seats, wiped the sweat from our brows, and inspected what food we’d ended up with. To begin with, we tucked the sandwiches away, afraid the crinkle of packaging would be our undoing, but hunger and a growing sense of daring pushed us towards testing the limits of this blessing and sampling just a bite. 

Eventually we capitulated altogether and chewed merrily away on a surprisingly tasty hummus and sun-dried tomato sandwich while Roo continued to slumber across me.

After an hour in sleepland, his little head came up, hair in disarray, and we launched into long and detailed praises of what a wonderful boy he was as he blinked up at us before swatting at a vomit bag.

The captain announced the descent and we prepared for the final test of the journey. Alex had a second fruit pacifier ready and waiting, which at this point must come as no surprise to you, and so we descended as we ascended, with Roo chewing and slurping away and Alex and I acting nonchalant while tense from top to toes, ready for the re-pressurisation to kick in and our boy to transform into a howling monster. 

Thankfully, with the assistance of further snacks, inflight magazines, and adjoining passengers who mouthed sweet nothings at Roo from across the cabin, we touched down without seeing the Mr Hyde to Roo’s happily babbling Dr Jeckell. We had a few impatient grunts while waiting for the torturously slow disembarking (with us in the middle of the aircraft, effectively putting us the end of two lines as passengers shuffled to either end of the plane) but they were coming from Alex and I as much as Roo, so we couldn’t really complain.

A crowded bus took us to the airport, Roo held in my arms but with him dutifully holding onto the pole for added security, and then we had done it. We were in Greece. The sunshine was hot, the terrain dry, and both us and our fellow commuters had arrived without our ears ringing from two hours of a screaming child. A miracle had occurred in the skies that day and we hugged our boy and informed him that he was, in fact, an angel.

This opinion wavered on the three-hour drive from the airport to our accommodation where, in the final hour, our angel decided he’d had enough, that he was snacked out, that a second nap was out of the question, that no cartoon, no matter how bright and idiotic, could hold his attention, that any attempts of comfort were unappreciated, and the only way to express himself was to cry at top volume with tears and snot decorating his face in ribbons. 

Alex and I shared a look, shrugged, turned up the volume of the radio, and agreed that it was better that it was happening here, in the cabin of our car, with just us as an audience.

We arrived at our beautiful accommodation, our villa perched on the side of a hill with a view of the bay below us, exhausted, rung out, but essentially in one piece. Roo perked up once he was able to stretch his legs and made himself quite at home in the new digs, to the point that Alex and I almost could have believed the last hour was a shared delusion except for the tinnitus whining away just on the edge of our hearing.

We got Roo fed, dressed, and laid him in his crib, where, with some gentle encouragement, he finally succumbed to sleep, and then we called for some take away. We inhaled the gyros and chips on the terrace, the hummus and sun-dried tomato sandwich a distant memory, in view of our own private pool and with the lights of the bay blinking on, appreciating none of it and waiting only until we had digested enough to justify going to bed.

But when morning broke the next day, the sun painting the sky a rainbow of dusk colours and Roo waking at a time to ensure we could appreciate it, we reflected on the previous day’s success and sent out a final thanks to the patron saints of parents for having taken us into their fickle embrace.

We had done it, we had flown the two hours with a baby and had achieved the supreme victory of having had most of the other passengers oblivious to the fact that they had shared their journey with a pressure-sensitive bawling grenade.

We were able to replicate the experience on the return flight, complete with a mid-air nap, and Roo only crying in the final fifteen minutes as the pressure difference finally got to him and he became inconsolable. Thankfully this stopped the minute the pressure equalised and he returned to his previous activity of chowing down on a rusk stick.

In a week’s time we will once again take to the air and our new-found confidence will be put to the ultimate test. Rather than a two-hour jaunt across Europe, we will be flying to the planet’s southern hemisphere, to my home of Australia, a journey that takes two flights, a four-hour layover, and a total of twenty-four hours to complete.

Please pray for us and may the patron saint of parents have mercy on our souls.

Next week’s topic: The Fear that Comes With Fatherhood

My maestro of management, my force of forethought, and our angel/devil enjoying the tropical rewards of flying

Raising Roo: What Goes in Must Come Out

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The relationship between food consumption and the terminal endpoint of this food’s journey through the digestive tract is one that is well known. Put simply: we eat, we poop. 

The facets of this complex interplay between our source of nutrition and our body’s assimilation and elimination of organic matter was originally explained to me by a giraffe puppet in a van parked in our school’s parking lot. While this may seem like the opening of a crime novel, one in which the next scene involves my parents finding my bed empty and a giraffe puppet left in my place, it wasn’t as sketchy as it sounds. The van was called the Life Education Van and the giraffe was called Harold, a character all us kids believed was real despite the fact that Harold only appeared from his hole in the van’s wall when the educator was pressed up against the same wall within arm’s distance of Harold. And despite the fact that Harold was clearly a puppet.

But except for the Victorian Government’s unique efforts to bring health education to primary school children, the mechanics of digestion is something not normally discussed in polite society. We invent euphemisms for it, saying socially acceptable statements such as: “I’m going to go wash up”, “I just need to relieve myself”, or “I’m going to drop the kids off at the pool.”

One of the first things you pick up as a new parent is that poop is no longer taboo. In fact, poop very quickly becomes a favourite topic of conversation. Some would even say an obsession.

Our journey into the defecation delights of our offspring began the first night in hospital. Due to the COVID restrictions at the time, I had been hustled out of the hospital and sent to my room like a misbehaving child, so I was sadly not there when Alex opened Roo’s tiny diaper and discovered the black sticky gold that is meconium. For the uninitiated, meconium is a baby’s first poop and is vastly different from the substance we’re more familiar with coming out of our backsides. It’s often described as a black tar-like substance, which isn’t something you expect to see leaking out of your newborn miracle of life. The upside is that it’s essentially odourless. The downside is the knowledge of what it’s made of.

Some of you may have already ventured down the thought-train of wondering how a baby that has previously never enjoyed a good meal has anything ready and waiting in his lower colon. It turns out that babies want to come out of the gate fully set up for that first delicious drink, and so in order to prepare their digestive system, they start taking small sips of whatever they can get their mouth around. Given that they’re suspended in a soup of amniotic fluid, amniotic fluid is what they drink.

This in and of itself is no great concern; amniotic fluid is a rather sterile substance. The problems start to arise when all this liquid they’ve drunk wants to come out, so their newly developed urinary system gets to work and pees most of it out, only it has nowhere to go except back into the fluid in which they’re suspended. But the baby still wants to practice their drinking so they guzzle it back down. And so the cycle continues. 

But urine isn’t the only additive to their amniotic brew. Thrown into this cocktail is flaked-off skin cells, fine fur-like hairs that the baby sheds in-utero, and equal parts mucus and bile, all of which slides down their tiny throat to pool in the belly and kick start the first journey through the newly minted intestines. This collected, digested, and compressed assortment of ingredients are what make up the black diamond that is meconium.

It is this disgusting and oddly fascinating secretion that is the gateway drug into the addictive world of being a diaper detective. 

When we first brought Roo home, his input concerned us more than his output. We were on the lookout for wet nappies, of course, but knew if we couldn’t get anything into him, there was no point worrying about what came out. 

Breastfeeding is a challenge for anyone, and despite the fact that this is how we’ve evolved to survive during these early helpless months, there’s no guarantee it will actually take. We went in fully armed, baby courses completed, books read, and breast pump warmed up and ready to go. Thankfully, Roo inherited his parents’ appetite and willingness to eat anything put in front of him, and so took to the nipple with the same gusto Alex and I take to a punnet of ice cream. This meant we didn’t have to wait long for poop number two. 

When that little brown stain appeared in the lining of his diaper, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was gold he was passing and not faecal matter given the sounds of celebration coming from Alex and I at this momentous occasion. We praised him on his cleverness, hoisted him aloft like the victorious hero that he was, then quickly returned him to the change table to avoid being peed on. 

It wasn’t long before we had a shared google sheet drawn up to track his colonic expulsions, the document updated with the accuracy and diligence expected from my nursing days. Each movement was oohed and aahed over appropriately before being wiped up and thrown away. The one who had done the wiping would handover to the other, providing details on size, odour, colour, and consistency, and, on a good day, the anatomical locations the poop had managed to track to despite our boy being essentially stationary. His best effort was the base of the neck, which, I know, seems to defy the laws of gravity, but there you have it. 

**GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING** (You didn’t really think you’d get through this post without seeing poop, did you?)

Our super sleuthing showed that the pattern of pooping was not always consistent, with the average duration between soiled diapers being two to three days, but sometimes extending to as much as a week before we again mined that brown coal. On these occasions we would wait with baited breath at each nappy change, peeling away the layers of absorbent material, only to slump our shoulders and shake our heads at finding a urine-only deposit. Please let me make it clear: it was for the health of our child and the reassurance that his plumping was flowing as it should that we were so keen to discover his next poop, not some sick delight in adding to our defecation collection, like a twisted version of Pokemon Go. Gotta catch ‘em all.

Once we crossed the five day mark and the poop drought was still ongoing, we would begin to get nervous, imagining the giant mass that must surely be building in Roo’s large intestines. I would gently palpate his abdomen, feeling for any collections and watching for signs of discomfort. Roo would smile and drool, as happy as if he’d had his morning constitutional just minutes ago. 

It was then that we would usually turn to the internet, which anyone living in the modern era knows can be an activity fraught with fear-mongering and misinformation, the equivalent of bathing in grease-coated water in an attempt to get clean. Nevertheless, we would dive into these depths, battering away sites convincing us of deadly diagnoses or miracle cures, to the haven of scientifically-mediated pages. It was here we learnt that it’s not uncommon for an infant to go a week without dropping their load and that it’s usually a sign of a growth spurt. Essentially, the baby’s body is working so hard figuring out the world and increasing in size that it uses every drop of resources available to it. Given there’s not a lot of bulk in breast milk in the first place, it leaves the bowels barren and any residual waste is disposed of via the urine. 

When the drought finally broke and we would see that look of concerned concentration on Roo’s features that we had deduced meant our son was involved in some internal reorganisation, we would cheer as if the rains had fallen on the drylands and dubbed Roo with the title “Super Pooper.” 

The joy in our new found hobby soured when Roo started on solid food. With carbohydrates, meat proteins, and fibre to fill out his downstairs cargo, those cute little near-odourless milky poops suddenly got an upgrade to proper stools, and while they didn’t match the volume of an adult voiding, they made up for it in strength of smell. 

The other thing that changed was Roo’s sudden interest in what we were getting up to down there during a diaper change. I presume he reasoned that given we were paying so much attention to his undercarriage, there must be some event taking place in which he should participate. And so, as not to miss out, he would plunge his hands down into the mess and grab and squeeze whatever he could get his fingers on. Those fingers would then reach lovingly for our faces to caress our cheek or perhaps do some finger painting with this newly discovered medium. 

This combination of increased odour and the risk of walking away with a poop handprint somewhere on your person cured us of our addiction and meant we instead would feel a trickle of dread every time Roo crawled over with a little extra junk in his trunk. Lately, while she’s prepping him for an outing, I’ve caught my wife whispering instructions to Roo to do all his pooping while he’s away, before handing him off like a loaded gun to the unwitting friend or family member kind enough to volunteer to babysit. 

This stool story, of course, still has a long way to go as we face the future challenge of toilet training, but for now we will continue to wind our way through the wastelands, breathing through our mouths, fending off rummaging little hands, and praising our boy on a job well done, hopefully sending the message that every number two makes him number one in our book.

Next week’s topic: Year One

2020/21

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It is the first morning of 2021 and I am sitting in bed drinking a cup of tea my wife made me and 2020 is done and I feel better for it.

Of course, there’s really no logic to my sense of relief. The period we called 2020 is, after all, just an arbitrarily chosen point in time. Millennia ago, some shaman determined that when the earth was in a particular position in its cycle around the sun, that the year had died, an end-date was formed, and it was deemed appropriate to celebrate the start of something new. The earth didn’t notice, of course, and just continued in its steady circle of the sun, but we living on earth thought it sounded like a good idea and have since continued the tradition of putting a full stop in our collective sentence every time the earth finds its way back to that same spot adjacent to the sun. It is random, arbitrary, and nothing really differs from 11:59, December 31st, 2020, to 00:00, January 1st, 2021. But it does help give us a sense of closure.

And, damn, but do we deserve a fictional but comforting sense of closure. The events of 2020 were anything but fictional, they were, in fact, painfully real. I won’t rehash them because we all know what they were, we all lived through them. We all watched the world close down, all read the countless news reports, watched the graphs and tallies as the number of cases grew, all closed our doors and settled in for the long wait, all obtained masks, and developed an intimate relationship with our sweatpants. 

You know what I’m talking about because you lived through it too. And it doesn’t matter if you’re reading this in a backyard in Melbourne, or an apartment in Vienna, or in bed in Beijing, because you went through it too. And as awful as the implications of that are, that this virus and its society-stopping impact managed to circumvent the world with frighteningly apparent ease, isn’t it remarkable that this goddamn year and all its weird and new and awful moments was a universally experienced phenomenon. 

I didn’t see my family this year. That is to say, I didn’t see them physically. For a full twelve months, for the entire rotation of the earth around the sun from an arbitrarily chosen point and back again, I was removed from the people who raised me. This has never happened before. I hope it never happens again. But, like the rest of the world, I adapted. I found creative ways to engage with my loved ones through digital means. I participated in video call parties, broke out of virtual escape rooms, and sat in my pyjamas at two in the morning, raising a glass of whiskey to my grandpa while attending his streamed funeral. 

It wasn’t the same, of course. Nothing can replicate the feel and warmth and comfort of a long tight hug. But it was something. It was still connection, and conversation, and laughter, and life shared, and while it’s easy to wish none of this had ever happened, instead I choose to be grateful that this all happened at a time when I could open a metal book, click a button, and see my family’s faces smiling back at me through pixels so small so as not to be seen. 

You know what I’m talking about because you lived through it too.

To say it was an emotional year is an understatement. I felt emotions I didn’t know could be felt. The casual boredom and anxiety of a lockdown. The quiet exhilaration of completing a workday in pyjamas. The eerie sensation of stepping onto a train platform and seeing only masked faces looking back at you. But the primary emotion I felt this year was frustration. 

I felt frustrated by the limitations of lockdown. I felt frustrated when an overwrought network failed and a call to my family froze. I felt frustrated trying to take a work call while my wife tried to take one too from half a metre away in our cobbled together home-office. I felt frustrated looking at the same four walls day in and day out. I felt frustrated every time I saw a nose poking over the top of someone’s mask. I felt frustrated every time I forgot to unmute myself. And I felt overwhelmingly frustrated every time there was news reports of people having parties in the middle of a lockdown, of people who knew they were infected but thought it was okay to pop into the shops, of morons claiming that wearing a piece of protective clothing was somehow impinging of their personal freedoms, of selfishness, and borders closing, and death tolls rising, and flights cancelled, and that day when I could return to my family stretching further and further into the future until it seemed to disappear over the horizon line altogether. 

I felt frustrated with a society I thought was better than this.

You know what I’m talking about because you lived through it too.

But focusing on this frustration is a choice, and a bad one. And that was something else I had to learn to adapt to in 2020, choosing where to direct my attention in a way that best served me. It was so easy to get sucked into the endless feed of headlines and the addictive horror that was the virus and its effects, and to believe the world was ending. But it wasn’t ending, only changing, and there are good parts to change if you look for them.

2020 was the year of the virus, but it was also the year I got to spend every day with my wife and best friend. Rather than break us, being confined together taught us new ways to spend time together and new ways to give each other space. It made me more grateful than ever that I found a partner who I can literally spend every minute of my life with and still want more. 

2020 was the year of the virus, but it was also the year I didn’t have to commute to work anymore and so had time to exercise. I started slow, and with short distances, but then ran longer, and faster. I ran in sweltering summer heat and pitch black winter evenings. I got fitter and felt better inside my own bones. 

2020 was the year of the virus, but it was also the year we all got crafty. We baked sourdoughs, and banana breads, and all the comfort food we needed to get through the long days. We picked up knitting needles, pencils, paintbrushes, and tools, and we made things. We took photographs and made videos, and wrote things, and read things. We found new hobbies and new ways to enjoy our time. 

And you know exactly what I’m talking about because you lived through it too.

I know nothing really differs from 11:59, December 31st, 2020, to 00:00, January 1st, 2021. I know it’s all arbitrary. But, dammit, I am still hopeful for this coming allotment of time. Not because some past shaman was right and something has died only for something new to be born, and not because the slate magically becomes clean just because we add an extra digit to the end of the calendar, but because in these last twelve months we have all adapted. We have been through an ordeal and we have learnt from it.

My hope is that we will take the collective lessons into the new year, the major groundbreaking discoveries and the intimate personal revelations. My hope is that 2021 is the year the vaccine works and we contain the virus. My hope is that 2021 is the year I get to hug my family again. But whatever 2021 brings, my hope is that I continue to grow and adapt and find new ways to connect and enjoy my time. 

And I am comforted by the knowledge that you will know what I’m talking about because you will be there, living through it too.

Vienna in the time of COVID – Chapter 26

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With the days warming up over here, Summer is knocking on the back door, waiting to get in, which means all Europeans’ minds are turning towards one thing: the holidays. While things are improving in Austria in regards to the COVID restrictions — shops are reopening with strict guidelines in place regarding masks and the number of customers allowed inside at one time (it’s progress!) — the idea of being able to go on the usual beach holiday is still pretty much out of the question. As a consolation prize, the Austrian government has announced that travel to Germany and the Czech Republic may be allowed, but given that these locations are basically cookie cutter countries to Austria, at least in terms of topography and landscape, this is not proving to be a particularly exciting prospect for many Austrians. I imagine it’s a bit akin to booking an AirBnB only to find out it’s your neighbour’s house. It’d be interesting for a day, and for sure you’d snoop through their stuff for a while, but then you’re just staring at the same scenery from a slightly different perspective. 

More and more this holiday season, it’s looking like any vacation will have to be of the internal variety. But maybe, with a bit of imagination, it’s still possible to replicate the travel experience from the comfort of your own home. Let’s see what we’re working with:

THE JOURNEY

In order to truly capture the thrill of the flight, my first suggestion would be to find the most uncomfortable chair in your house, the one you keep in the basement or shed and every time you look at it you think “I should really throw that out” before closing the door and leaving it there forever. Set this chair up facing a wall or directly behind where your partner is sitting; the key component is to ensure there is only so much space between yourself and the object/person in front of you that your legs remain constantly bent at a 45 degree angle. 

For the next twenty-four hours, give yourself that real jetsetter experience by remaining in the chair at all times and doing nothing but eating reheated food and watching a collection of movies that never really interested you before, but will do to pass the time. 

For additional authenticity, every time you get up to go to the bathroom, spin yourself around a few times. This will ensure you get that genuine dizzy and slightly disoriented feeling whenever you’re sitting on the toilet. Bonus points for anyone who props up a mirror on the back of their toilet door so they can watch themselves as they do their business and consider how terrible they look. 

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THE BEACH HOLIDAY

As a landlocked country, the beach getaway is an important pilgrimage for the Austrian people, and while there’s no replacing the real deal, it is possible to create a poor facsimile of the real deal. Begin by coating the floor of your bathroom with fine-grained white sand, the type that feels soft and warm beneath the soles of your feet and pressing up between your toes. If your access to sand is limited, cat litter is readily available at most supermarkets.

Set up an electric heater in the room to simulate the tropical warmth you are used to finding at the beach. A tan is essential to ensure you look and feel the part, so sit as close as you can tolerate to the heater until you can feel your skin literally baking. When it is the colour of a freshly cooked spit roast pig, you’ll know you’re ready to strut your stuff.

Next, fill the bathtub with lukewarm to cold water and tip in as much salt as is available in your home. You’ll want enough to ensure that the fashionable second degree burn you have just acquired will sear upon contact with the water and that you will emerge with eyes as red as your skin. For additional authenticity, throw in strips of the slightly sludgy lettuce you forgot was in your crisper, as well as any old plastic bottles or bandaids you have in the trash.

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THE WILDERNESS GETAWAY

For many of us, a holiday is all about communing with nature. This experience can be replicated in the home with just a little effort. Begin by surrounding yourself with any and all house plants that you may own and try sparking up a conversation. Congratulations, you are now communing with nature. If you continue to the point that the plants begin to talk back, you have gone too far.  

Exposure to wildlife is also a big part of a wilderness getaway. Alex and I have taken up the pastime of attempting to lure the local cats up onto our balcony or in through the front door. While your neighbours may view this as the kidnapping of their beloved pets, you’ll know you are just doing your part to love and support the native fauna. If you start seeing “missing pet” signs being hung around your apartment block, you have gone too far.

A picnic on the bed is a great way to enjoy some rustic eating. Buy some bread and dips, some cheese and meat, be sure to remove any cats you may have trapped in the bedroom, and tuck into some wholesome food. If you can’t remember the last time you ate anywhere except the bed and wake up with salami slices stuck to your skin and ants in the bedding, you have gone too far.

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Those essential elements to a vacation are obtainable with a little out-of-the-box thinking, at least enough to fool that internal travel bug long enough until the world is once again open for business. And if all that fails, pop up any and all of your travel shots as a slideshow on your television, sit as close as possible, and get drunk off home-made cocktails. Before too long, you’ll forget where you are entirely and fall asleep to views of the beach. Just like on a real holiday.

Tomorrow: Writing.

P.S. For a, possibly, more enjoyable virtual vacation, check out Sir David Attenborough’s interactive tour of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef: http://attenboroughsreef.com/

Vienna in the time of COVID – Chapter 22

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Yesterday was the anniversary of my wife’s birth, an occasion that requires the utmost of fanfare, obviously, but fanfare in the time of COVID is a tricky thing to come by. There can be no gathering of Alex’s adoring public, no party with a chorus line of handshakes and warm embraces. Luckily, Alex and I share everything, including microorganisms, so I could distribute the warm embraces on everyone’s behalf without the risk of being infected. It took up the better part of the day, to be honest. She’s a popular girl.

Given that restrictions dropped into place in Vienna almost a month ago, I had some time to prepare and make sure isolation didn’t get in the way of a proper celebration. Firstly, it’s important for you to know that my wife’s glee in birthdays hasn’t diminished over the years like the rest of us cynic adults, but rather she will bounce up and down and tremble all over at the mere mention of her birthday like a puppy who just heard the word “park”. As such, there is no such thing as overdoing it when it comes to birthday decorations, which is why I was out of bed at 6:45 to ensure our living room looked like the inside of a clown car. 

The first step was to deconstruct our home office as Alex had made it very clear that monitors and office equipment do not set a birthday mood. The next was to coat the walls and roof with every possible decoration we had. As this is not my first rodeo, I had some already prepared, but had intended to buy some more up until the world went into lockdown and my access to party supply stores became severely limited. But, dredging up memories of making Christmas decorations in primary school at that time of the year when the teacher has all but given up and will use any time-killing activity at their disposal, I set about making some of my own. I had scissors, sticky tape, wrapping paper, and a whole lot of time on my hands, and from this collection spun out some of the best paper chains the world has ever seen. 

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The birthday cake is often the lynchpin to a birthday celebration, so I approached the task of baking with some trepidation. My apprehension was doubled as my wife is an amazing baker of cakes, both in flavour and appearance, and tripled as cakes hold great importance to the Austrian people. Coffee and cake is to the Austrians what tea and biscuits is to the British, or what vegemite toast and milo is to the Australians. Needless to say, the pressure was on. Fortunately for me, my wife is very direct when it comes to matters of food, so when it was time to select the variety of cake to make, she said “I want that one” and no further research was necessary. The result was a lemon sponge with raspberry cream, with a ratio of one part cake to two parts cream. This is a ratio I fully support. 

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Once cake and decorations were unveiled to a reaction of happy foot taps from Alex, which immediately made all efforts worthwhile, it was onto the real deal. The present giving. Being a creative guy, I normally like to make something by hand to give the gift that personal touch. But after five years together, Alex has about all the paintings, drawings, crocheted beanies, and pieces of writing that any sane person would need, so this year I went in a different direction and just spent as much money as I could to compensate. The gift was a set of Bose noise-cancelling headphones that I had intuited that Alex might want after picking up on subtle clues, such as her stating “I really want those”. She planned to buy them herself with any and all birthday money she received, not thinking I had budgeted to buy her such a gift, but she severely underestimated how far I would go to buy her love. 

The noise-cancelling headphones were originally intended to be used when flying to exotic destinations, but the whole global pandemic resulting in all planes being grounded really put a wrench in the gears of that plan (thanks COVID). But a new and better use for them has arisen in the meantime, one which could see an improvement to our time in quarantine, and even, in the long term, our marriage: Alex can wear them to avoid hearing me eat.

I no longer have to live in fear of getting a fork to my baby-soft skin every time I go to eat an apple. Sometimes things just work out for the best.

In addition to this gift, I also lashed out and got her the most luxurious birthday card that money could buy.

The rest of the day was made up of video chats, socially distant visits from friends, cake, walks in the glorious Spring weather, phone calls, cake, a socially isolated trip to the people responsible for Alex’s birth in the first place (her parents), different cake, and then crashing early to lie in bed and try to digest all the cake we had eaten.

My wife is an incredible, generous, considerate, loving person (see Easter post Re: “Angel in a human suit”) whom I love to bursting, and it pained me that someone who so loves their birthday would have to spend one in isolation from the people in her life. My heartfelt thanks goes out to all the beautiful people who texted, phoned, video chatted, sent photos, and voicemails, and videos, sung happy birthday, left Facebook posts, who sent cards, and presents, and flowers, and made pasta salad, and showed their love à la Love Actually, and made Alex feel as unisolated and as special as these times will allow.

Rather than it being a birthday that was forgotten, you all made it a birthday she will never forget. Thank you.

Have a great weekend, everyone, and whatever else you do with these days, make sure you eat some cake. I know I will.

On Monday: Grooming.