That’s What She Said: Kiwi Baby

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Three weeks in New
Zealand with a seven months old baby – what could go wrong? Well, from a quick
search on the Internet – everything. For one thing, they don’t carry our brand
of baby formula, they have a giant hole in the ozone and their cable is
satellite. Even one of those is enough to scare the mom-jeans off of me.

I don’t come from a
long line of travellers. From what my mom tells me, from birth to ten years old
we never left the homestead except for school or to go look at the beaver dam
behind our house – and we still managed to break every limb and a few fingers.

Travelling seemed like
a good idea seven months ago. I was pregnant and swore up and down that I would
not change post-partum. I would still be the same daring, reckless adventurer
that I’ve always been. Except, of course, that I have never been any of those
things. My idea of risk-taking is using a different entrance to the midtown mall.

As the trip
approached, I dealt with my growing anxiety by packing. I packed for every possible
baby-related contingency for a week straight. Then I watched as my partner
pared down my hard work to two suitcases and two carry-ons. He says I “got out
of control.” I still say that we could have used our changing table – what if
New Zealand has no flat surfaces?

We flew into Auckland
on a 13 hours long flight. Until the hour before we left, I thought it was an eight
hours’ flight. It wasn’t until my partner bragged to the cab driver “we’ll be
flying for almost fourteen hours” that I realized. He says that he told me how
long it was but I don’t remember that. (I suspect treachery.)

Our seats came with a
baby bassinet. I can’t think of an easier way to travel with an infant, other
than getting seats on a different plane from your baby. FYI: they don’t allow
that – I asked.

We were lucky that
most flights were on time. Babies do not like flight delays. And neither do mommies
as it is my job to constantly gage the amount of food and diapers needed for
each stretch of the journey. I was reading the Martian on this trip and
certainly identified with the protagonist’s complex sustenance calculations
after he was trapped on Mars. (At least he got to recycle his feces for food.)
Baby’s dad was less nervous, believing that if we ever ran of out of baby food,
we could use ice cream to fill in the “nutritional holes.” I’d like to fill in
his nutritional holes.

We were using the
stroller to schlep the baby around until we got to Wellington. We climbed a
staircase as long as four pregnancies stacked on top of one another while
carrying the stroller, the car seat, the baby and a deep resentment for Wellington
city planners. After that day – also known as the day of a thousand leg cramps
– we switched to a baby carrier – it’s awkward and makes me sweat like I’m
eating soup in a sauna but the baby loves it.

After the first leg of
our journey, the baby came down with a stomach bug. He threw up a few times,
the most dramatic occurrence at three a.m., in bed, on his parents. Until that
moment I didn’t realize how much being a parent is like being a roadie for a
heavy metal band.

New Zealand baby food
is pretty nuts. Pumpkin and lamb? Beef rice and kumala? Blueberries, kiwis and
guava? Isn’t guava … bat crap? I’m sure its got a lot of protein but how is
that even legal? Everywhere I look I see cherub faced fatties so I know kiwi
babies are eating this stuff. The baby likes everything but I put my foot down
at lamb. It seems cannibalistic for a baby to be eating another baby.

We’re halfway through
the trip and the baby is thriving as he destroys hotel rooms across the country.
He enjoys seeing new faces and sights every day which makes me think that maybe
this wasn’t the worst idea ever. And there are even moments when I’m not a
hyper-vigilant mom, usually after a glass of wine.