Close Quarters & Etiquette

As relaxing as a beach/pool holiday can be, there’s only so much peace you can get with 2 kids in tow. Particularly when the family of 4 plus one mother in law are sharing one hotel room. It was unavoidable since by the time Grandma had decided to join us in Veracruz the hotel was fully booked. Of course, Grandma does not actually cause us any problems, more the other way round. I feel very guilty about her lack of sleep, particularly since she is flying back to Australia on Friday, arriving Sunday, ready to return to work Monday. She will need a holiday to recover from her holiday.

The lack of sleep is partly due to Chiq having come down with her first proper sickness, a case of tonsillitis. Pobrecita (poor little thing), as Guerita says to her. Its hardly surprising considering Guerita’s propensity for tonsillitis (and mine as a child). We’ve become so used to Guerita getting it that the first sign of a fever or sore throat, I have the mini maglight out peering in her mouth looking for tell-tale red and white tonsils. We’ve all had a cold, but Chiq has also suffered from a fever so has had a few miserable nights. I suspect though that a lot of the reason for her middle of the night sleeplessness (for about 2 hours mostly) is because she briefly rouses as she probably does most nights and notices 4 other people in the room that are potential playmates. Once she’s spotted us, she is wide awake, standing up in the cot, ready to play. In the past in hotel rooms like this we’ve found ingenious ways of keeping the cot out of sight so that we are able to read or watch TV in the evening after the baby is asleep (often the cot ends up in the bathroom), but this time we have been provided with a weird sort of mini-cot which comes up to chest height on Chiq when she’s standing up. Not particularly safe for a bigger baby, so we’re keeping her close by in case she suddenly discovers the ability to get a leg over the side and crash head first onto the hard tile floor. At least Chiq is on the mend now, after a visit from an on-call doctor who prescribed our usual antibiotic course. (He arrived at our room within 30 minutes of our call, and arranged delivery of the medication to the hotel, all for USD$50. Bargain!) Although we’ve seen the paediatrician many times in Mexico for Guerita’s tonsillitis, I still struggle to pronounce the word in Spanish (amigdalitis).

I feel awful for Guerita too, who has been such a trooper and has discovered a previously unrealized talent for whispering. This is a girl who does not stop talking all day, usually at the top of her voice. She has LITERALLY fallen asleep mid-sentence before. But she’s thankfully complied willingly with our requests to stay quiet when trying to get Chiq to sleep. I never wanted to be one of those Mums who demanded utter silence when the baby was sleeping, but times are desperate. I’m amazed too by what Guerita is able to sleep through – 2 hours of crying not 10 feet away and she’s dead to the world. I did discover her tonight with the pillow wrapped round her head though.

Amongst all of this is that after months of waiting and prompting, Chiq has started saying “mamamama”. The only problem is she only says it when she’s crying and whinging! Dad gets a beaming smile and “dadadada”, I get outstretched arms, big fat tears and “maaamaaamaaamaaa”.

The great thing for us about having Grandma on holiday with us is having another set of hands to help with the kids while my husband’s off at his conference, and to have a babysitter on hand for a couple of evenings out. Last night we went to a dinner hosted by the Australian Ambassador to Mexico and the Austrade Trade Commissioner. We have been discussing this dinner for weeks and debating the correct etiquette for addressing an Ambassador. On the one hand, we thought he probably had some formal title that was the proper way to address an important international diplomat (apparently “Mr Ambassador” or “Ambassador Mules” [his last name] are correct), but it doesn’t really seem the Aussie way to stand on such ceremony and we joked that maybe the more appropriate and truly Australian greeting was “Howsitgarn, Mulesy?”. In the end, it was somewhere in between – he introduced himself by name with no title and that was that. It was a typically low-key Australian affair – a pleasant dinner with plenty of Aussie wine and very short speeches. Tomorrow night is a cocktail party hosted by the Queensland government - another excuse to drink Australian wine I think and mingle with a few fellow Aussies. The event itself is almost not important for me – I’m just happy to have a meal out that doesn’t require a high chair or involve pureed pear being flicked across the room.

Chiq’s sickness and the resulting fatigue have limited our activities a bit, but today we ventured out to the Acuario de Veracruz, an Aquarium to rival our own AQWA at home. Chiq loved getting up close with the fishes and Guerita was quite taken with the toucans in the small bird section (“Just like Señor Toucan in Dora, Mum”). The adjoining wax museum was typically naff, but amongst Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nicole Kidman and Superman, there were several notable Mexicans, historical and modern, including Salma Hayek who is from Veracruz.

We haven’t ventured any further afield to some of the archaeological and colonial sites (Veracruz was the first landing point for Hernan Cortes and the Spanish Conquistadors) in part because of our ongoing holiday dilemma– car seats. What do you do when you’re away with the kids and traveling in cars, taxis, buses etc? We debated bringing 1 or both of the car seats and decided against it because even if you can manage to strap them into a taxi to get to your destination, you are then stuck carrying them around with you. So we’ve been catching taxis, some without seatbelts even, clutching the children and trying to justify this lapse in something we are so vigilant about at home. There’s got to be a gap in the market for a travel car seat that can be easily carried on a plane or in your backpack, made out of some magical 22^nd century material, no doubt.