The attack on and demonization of Christmas has been going on in the U.S. for decades now, if not longer. You can’t say “Merry Christmas” without someone looking at you strange in the U.S. and someone on the far left insinuating you’re not being inclusive. The far right demonizes this and makes the entire situation worse. Since I’ve spent my entire full-time working life employed by digital marketing or technology companies, saying “merry Christmas” is not something that is acceptable in a group setting, and everyone feels forced to say a generic “happy holidays” message when it is Christmas time. This is supposedly to be sensitive to those who are Jewish, Muslim, or just don’t celebrate Christmas. This is ridiculous since any Jew you know will tell you that Hanukkah, while a holiday in Jewish culture, is not a big deal at all, with no real decorations or associated gift giving (the gift giving, from what I’ve been told, only really started because of the gift giving around Christmas and that influence). In addition, even in many non-Christian majority countries or majority Muslim countries, people celebrate Christmas in a secular way, meaning they embrace the Christmas trees and decorations, Rudolph the red-nose reindeer, and Santa, but they don’t really celebrate it as the birthday of Jesus Christ (and well, any real Christian can tell you that it’s not REALLY Jesus’s actual birthday, anyway!). The majority of my friends who celebrate Christmas celebrate in a secular way and are in no sense Christian, yet even most of them feel compelled to say “happy holidays” to each other. It’s annoying and exhausting.

I had to exercise a lot of restraint and keep silent while on a work call a few days ago when someone on Zoom said, “Hope you all have a happy holiday if you celebrate this weekend (um, there’s only ONE known holiday this weekend, and it’s CHRISTMAS). And if you do not, hope you all have a restful time off.” Why couldn’t she just have replaced the word “holiday” with “Christmas?” Is “Christmas” really such an evil word? N

So you can probably imagine that when I tell friends and colleagues in the U.S. how easily and readily and often people wish each other a “happy Christmas” or “merry Christmas” in Australia that they are pretty surprised. People don’t get offended by it. My general response or thought back would be, if someone wished me a happy Kwanzaa or happy Rosh Hashanah, why the hell would I get offended? And you know Christmas is embraced by all here, even if you don’t celebrate it or identify as Christian, when there is an actual Santa Claus who walks around the major airports here with an elf and a big sack of gifts to pass out to young children in transit; this would be very hard to imagine happening in any U.S. airport, ever.

Kaia met Santa twice going to and from Bundaberg at the domestic airports here. At the Melbourne airport, Santa walked up to her at our gate and presented her with a stuffed kangaroo with a little joey in her pouch. And on our way back to Melbourne at the Brisbane airport between our connecting flights, Santa appeared again at the entrance of the Qantas lounge, where she was given a set of special edition Qantas 3-5-year old-size pajamas with the kangaroo logo redone so that the kangaroo had a glittery red nose, sparkling gold antlers, and a name on the front of the pajama top reading: Roodolph. It was so sweet and special, yet I have a feeling that Chris, Chris’s dad, and I were going to enjoy and appreciate this far more than Kaia ever would for a long, long time.

So the TL;DR of this is really: Christmas is better in Australia than in the U.S. And I can walk around with dancing Santas or blaring red and green Christmas baubles on my head here, and no one will do a double take because I will blend right in.

Today, we met up with Chris’s friend, husband, and their two daughters for brunch at a fun, kid-friendly brunch spot called Eastwood. Next door to Eastwood was a little barber shop that had a life-sized dancing Santa in front of the store. When you click a button by the Santa’s feet, it starts singing all different Christmas songs and dancing, moving both its arms and legs. As you’d imagine, the three kids were completely enchanted by this Santa. Kaia has just been getting acquainted with Santa in the last week, having seen him walking around the Melbourne and Brisbane airports and lounges twice already. Our friends’ younger daughter, who can be a little feisty, was a bit rough with the Santa. The owner of the shop popped out once to let her lightly know that the kids could get hurt if they were too aggressive with the Santa. He was so gentle and warm with the kids that it seemed like he was more worried about their safety rather than whether the kids would break his dancing Santa. Eventually, he took the Santa back into the shop, but I thought he exercised a high amount of patience and restraint given what the youngest kid was doing with his Santa.

I imagined the same thing happening in the U.S., and I imagined it would have been more of a scold to the parents rather than the shop owner addressing the kids nicely. In the U.S., kids are seen as a nuisance and a liability, whereas here, they seem to blend into society more and be accepted as actual tiny humans. It was actually sweet to see the exchange between the shop owner and the kids.

In the last couple of months, Kaia has become obsessed with menus at restaurants. When we sit down at a table, she will immediately grab one of our menus and prevent us from actually reading it. So oftentimes, we will have to share a menu between the two of us while she fusses with hers, flipping the pages (if it’s multiple pages) or thrashing it in the air. While eating at Grunske’s the other day, she was super attached to the menu. When the server came by to take them, she was still intently playing with it when the server removed it from her hands (with some resistance) and walked away. Pookster immediately had a melt down, crying with big fat tears streaming down her face. Yet out of nowhere, a nice woman came and gave Kaia her menu. She turned towards us with a sympathetic expression on her face.

“I can’t believe that mean server just took the menu away from you!” the woman said to Kaia. She then turned to us. “I mean, she was in the middle of reading her menu happily, and then she just grabbed it and took it away without any regard for her! She deserves to take as much time as she wants to read the menu! This age is just so precious and goes by so quickly! I hope you enjoy her as much as you can!”

It’s so true, though. Little kids at Kaia’s age have big feelings, and they don’t have all the words to verbally express themselves. We give them orders all day long, especially telling them they can’t do this, can’t touch that. We take things like menus at restaurants away from them without thinking they have any autonomy. From their perspective, it’s a LOT. This nice woman’s intervention made me think more about how having a toddler slows you down… and frankly, it should. We really should think more about their feelings and go at a slower pace for them to take everything in around them. It would probably benefit us all to slow down and stop going through life so quickly.

Pookster, as with almost all our trips, has adjusted really well to the 16-hour time difference this past week. Every night, she has slept the full night in her own (floor) bed. The only area that’s been a bit iffy is whether she knows what time it is to eat and when she’s actually hungry. But I’ll take the sleeping-through-the-night over the all-over-the-place eating/hunger any day. I know she will make up for the calories at some point later.

But I will say: fighting with her over getting her into her high chair or putting on her silicone bib to eat is not fun. The other day, I chased her around the kitchen area after telling her it was time to eat dinner.

“Pooks! It’s time to eat dinner!” I called.

“No! No!” she yelled back, running away.

I followed behind her, holding her bib and positioning it so that I could put it around her neck.

“Yes, it’s dinner time!”

She turned back, glared at me, and then turned her back towards me. “No! I do what I want!”

Chris’s mom and I both did a double take and looked at each other, then started laughing. Did she really say what we think she just said? And who the heck taught her how to say that…?! She just turned 2, but she’s already giving me all this attitude and grief! I was not prepared for this!

A few months ago, I started thinking about booking an outdoor family photo shoot session for the three of us while in Melbourne. I had originally thought of the idea for our Australia trip last year, but I thought that given Kaia wasn’t walking yet back then that the photos may not be as interesting. So I decided to start looking into it for this year when she’d be 2 years old and more active. Unfortunately, what that also meant is that at this age, she has a more acute “stranger danger” and gets scared or mad at new people getting close to her. I hesitated to book it given her stranger danger, but I thought, why not? The vast majority of family photographers are used to “stranger danger” and getting kids of her young age to smile and be silly in photos, so I figured her experience as a photographer would help ease Kaia into the session.

While it may have been a bit cliche to do a photo shoot at the beach boxes on Brighton Beach if we lived in Australia, it seems more fun and unique since we live in New York, so we decided on that location. For dates that worked with us, this morning was the only time that worked, and when you want the optimal light for an outdoor photo session, a good photographer will insist that your session either be at dusk or dawn. So we had to suck it up and get all of us up early for the shoot. At least it was just a two minute drive from Chris’s parents’ house.

Our photographer was sweet, friendly, patient, and efficient. Unfortunately, even with the snacks we packed Kaia, she still fussed and got really upset at our photographer’s presence. It also probably did not help that we started at 7:30, so we had to cut Kaia’s breakfast short, which caused a lot of tantrums. In addition to that, it was extremely windy on the beach and a bit cold given what we were wearing, and though Pookster usually enjoys the wind, you could actually see her shivering and have goosebumps on her arms. She refused to walk almost the entire time. I would be shocked if our photographer got even a few photos of Kaia smiling. But somehow, our photographer was gracious and helpful the whole time with suggestions, and she made it all work.

Welp. We paid for the photo session, so it is what it is. I’m positive that there were at least a handful of photos that were good that we’d want to frame and display. But I do know for sure that if I book another family photo session, I will make sure that a) Kaia is old enough to follow directions and not have stranger danger anymore, and b) if any way possible, to control for the weather/wind. I guess that’s why so many families do indoor photo sessions, either in their own homes or at a studio, so that they don’t have to worry about the weather!

If you chat with any parent of a young child, especially of toddler age, they will tell you that parenting is both so adorable and sweet, yet completely and utterly exhausting at the same time. And how could it not be? Toddler age children are learning more and more about the world around them and absorbing it, figuring out what their place is. They get excited by the little things that we adults take for granted. They’re responding to all their different stimuli. While all that is happening, they’re also discovering their emotions and how people or things will respond to them, which could potentially result in tantrums. No parent likes tantrums. But most parents who love their children would agree that moments like the below are what makes parenting during this period so sweet.

We were on a cushy layover at London Heathrow Airport early Sunday morning, so Chris decided that we should spend time at the Cathay Pacific Lounge to shower, rest, and eat before our connecting flight. The Cathay Lounge at Heathrow is particularly gorgeous and comfortable in that it has floor to ceiling windows to give you a full-on view of planes on the runway, coming and going. Kaia is really loving all motor-operated things now. She loves watching cars and trucks on the road, and she really enjoys identifying airplanes. When she sees them, she visibly gets excited and starts saying “airplane! plane! fei ji!” nonstop, and she keeps watching them with her full interest. She stood intently at the corner of the room, looking outside the window and watching the planes constantly coming and going. But when there was a break and no planes came for a while, she kept looking out the window, then up at Chris, signing “more” with the fingertips of both hands tapping each other. I didn’t observe this initially and Chris saw it first, but when he told me about it when I came back from my shower, I couldn’t help but gush and just think it was too adorable. I then subsequently heard Kaia repeatedly say “more? more?” for more planes, and sign it with her hands.

These are some of the best toddler moments, the ones I want to have emblazoned in my mind forever to remember how precious she is.