holiday in the sun

We are off to Cuba, one last blast before I go back to work at the end of February. I am starting to worry about the return, not much, as I know he will be in good hands with Martin, but more that I will lose this intense closeness and miss out on things. He is so active now, starting to run, and BUSY, things to do, places to be. He has a big shiner, he fell sideways while standing at our coffee table.. poor spud.

Well I started this post in early February and now it's late March.. wow.. Cuba was a blast, Jack was one of the only kids at the resort and everyone knew him by name, it was like being the mother of a celebrity. People would come up to us and admire him, play with him, let slip remarks that revealed that our every move was seen: "wow, that was quite a tumble he took this morning" or "I can't believe he's not afraid of the waves".

He ran everywhere, first thing he did was get covered in sand, even his eyelids and lips, a thick all-over coating, like he had been turned into a sculpture, but he did not complain or fuss at all. He loved running into the waves, just completely reckless and fearless. In Ottawa he had never run outside so this was a whole new level of freedom.

He also showed deliberate naughtiness for the first time which was hilarious. We would put him in his travel crib -all mesh sides - for a nap, but he could see us lying on the bed, so would start to wave at us - perfect waves, like royalty, waves that he never does on command. When we would tell him to lie down, he would lie down but press his face against the mesh so he looked like he was wearing a stocking over his face and smile at us. It would take him ages to settle down, even with us refusing to interact with him, and trying not to laugh.

Given that he's still on two naps a day, we were not very adventurous. Our routine was breakfast, beach, nap (one of us presiding, while the other got Free Time to swim, drink delicious coffees, read, loll about), lunch, beach, nap (the other presiding) beach or pool, supper, bed. We often ended up going to bed at 8:30 ourselves as we couldn't leave him alone in the room. All in all very relaxing.

The way home was a crazy unnecessarily long 11 hour journey, including an hour trapped on the plane on the ground in Cancun, where he ran up and down the aisles risking head injury at every step. Because over half the plane had been at our resort, people were very nice when he started to fuss. I guess he'd proved himself as a basically 'good' baby on the flight down and over the week.

Back home there was a hideous line at the airport and it was 10:30 and he started to scream. Some other people in the line encouraged us to go ahead, so we went over to the empty 'Diplomats and Airline Staff' lineup. The Customs officer - who was doing Nothing to help her incredibly overworked colleagues- gave us a lecture and said we had no right to be there, and that we were queue-jumping. True. I pointed out (while aiming his wailing mouth at her head) that he was disturbing the entire echoing room full of tired passengers, and that many of them had encouraged us to leave the queue. She finally let us through. Meanwhile there was a poor woman with such bad food poisoning that she had been put on the plane in a wheelchair, stuck back in the queue, all hunched over. Do they do no sort of triage at all?? It doesn't bother me if elderly/infirm/sick/people with upset kids go ahead of me.

I was thinking about how often my first negative impression of a country is formed on arrival when dealing with authoritarian, obsessively rule-bound bureaucratic passport/customs officers, and realized that that would be the same impression a new arrival to Ottawa would get.

Anyhow, that hiccup aside, a gorgeous holiday.