Since it’s almost Christmas, I’ve been thinking of the past and specifically of Jay’s first Christmas. Since he was born in the first half of November, he was only around 6 weeks old when Christmas arrived that year. Also, since he was adopted, we had spent most of that time finalising the adoption and organising his trip to Singapore to join us here.
As it turned out, his adoption was finalised about a week before Christmas Day, but then we also had to get him a passport so that he could actually travel. Because of work, this task fell to SO, while I stayed in Singapore. SO went to Jakarta, where Jay was being looked after by her family, and went to work getting all the paperwork organised and applying for his passport. By some miracle, and SO’s extraordinary powers of manipulation, I mean hard work, she’s not manipulative at all, she managed to get the passport on Christmas Eve.
Now as you can imagine, getting a flight out on Christmas Eve or Day is basically impossible. As a result, I ended up spending Christmas Day alone in Singapore, while they spent the day with family in Jakarta. To be honest, it wasn’t the worst Christmas. As I’m an introvert, I enjoy time alone, and this was probably the last day I could really do that.
The following day, what a lot of us call boxing day, brought a boatload of people to Singapore. First, my parents and youngest brother arrived. They’d been planning to come since before we knew about Jay. And later in the afternoon, Jay and SO arrived.
It was perfect timing, he arrived only a few hours after my parents, and they got to meet their new grandson as soon as he arrived here. They didn’t get to do as much sightseeing as they had planned, but they did have a good time getting to know Jay, and showing us how to do things right in looking after a baby.
I did get in trouble at one stage though for feeding Jay some mango, but I don’t know what was wrong with that. He loved it, and it’s still one of his favourite fruits.