Parting Shot:
Valuing the Time
My 16-month-old daughter has never seen her home country, nor met one set of grandparents. She has yet to experience cold weather or meet her baby cousin, born almost exactly a year after her (though she has become skilled at blowing raspberries to her via Skype).
When she was first born, we took the easy option of having friends and family come visit us and her, and enjoyed our first family Christmas in the sun, thinking it would be more pleasant to schedule our next trip home for the spring. Of course, little did we know a global pandemic would shortly be upon us, and all foreseeable travel cancelled.
So, our baby girl has missed out on the many stamps her big sister has in her passport – and she was scared of all the planes flying overhead on National Day, with no memory of ever going on one.
But there are silver linings! We’ve not had to endure a 14hour flight with a baby and toddler, nor put them (and us!) through days and nights of jetlag sleeping in a new, cold and unfamiliar place.
Instead, she’s been able to enjoy the security of sleeping in the same cot every night, and having mummy and daddy at her beck and call when she bangs on the bedroom doors we hide behind with our laptops on a workday. She, frankly, delighted in us all being at home all the time during Circuit Breaker, and still hasn’t quite forgiven her big sister for leaving her to return to preschool in the mornings.
As for the rest of us, of course we’re desperately missing family and friends back home; and I, for one, am totally over working in the bedroom. But we have come to value the time we’re spending together as a little family unit (especially now we can go for family swims in the reopened condo pool!).
The best lockdown purchase I made, late at night after a glass of wine, was most definitely my beautiful bicycle, complete with toddler seat on the back. We can now go for family cycle rides down to the bay and beyond. Both girls love these jaunts, especially when they include a stop at Da Paolo for ice cream on the way home.
They may not have had a summer holiday this year, but we do have an album worth of photos of us all smiling from behind our sweaty masks as we’ve explored new play areas as they’ve reopened, hunted caterpillars and rediscovered brunch spots.
I only hope one day my daughters will ask why on earth we were all dressed up as doctors, and COVID-19 will be a very distant memory.