Monday, January 24, 2005 (Flight from Cairns to Uluru – Australia
- SPECIAL)
!!! THIS IS A SPECIAL LOG ENTRY !!!
Day 322 (132). Let’s see now, I’ve
not written anything at all for the past five days. For someone who sits and
writes this daily journal religiously for at least two hours every night,
that’s quite an unusual and protracted length of silence all of a sudden.
Why? I have a very good reason and we both now feel that the time is right to
reveal all. In each country that we visit, we try to find something special to
take back home with us. Well, we came up with something special here all right,
and it’s not something that we can send home with all the other parcels
either. Two of us left, but it will now be three of us returning home. Yes,
that’s right, we are going to have a baby. I should probably point out
that this was not a planned pregnancy and we’ve been dealing with the
shock waves over the past few days, hence the temporary suspension of journal
entries. Indeed, the past few days have not been easy for either of us, as
we’ve slowly gotten to grips with the news. I can’t easily put into
words all the feelings and mixed emotions that we’ve just navigated
through but I can explain some of the issues that we’ve had to think
about. Firstly, if our calculations are correct, we were both taking Doxicycline
(anti-Malaria medication) at the time of conception. This caused us some great
concern, especially when we learned that this particular medication brings with
it the risk of birth defects if taken during pregnancy. Secondly, we are
currently half way around the planet (just about as far from home as is
physically possible) with our flight schedule not returning us home for another
six months or more. Another concern has been Sandy’s age. At thirty-seven,
she isn’t ‘very’ old but old enough for us to have to think
about some of the risks associated with pregnancy at that age. Additionally, we
have no ‘home’ of our own to return to, and no job either. We were
planning to return back to the UK and live temporarily with John & Lisa in
the hope that I would find employment relatively quickly. Although I’m
sure John & Lisa will have no problems with us returning to live with them
initially and in the short term, we couldn’t possibly impose to the point
of living with them with a baby. Our plans for after our travels were very much
up in the air and although we had been thinking loosely about various options,
we really didn’t have any idea of what the future was going to hold for
us. And now? Well, let’s just say that we’ve had to take a long,
hard, look at the situation. Over the past few days, we’ve considered all
the options open to us and we now have at least something of a game plan for the
next few months.
Naturally, Sandy and
I are both thrilled at the prospect of becoming parents. Initially, however, I
think we were both a little scared. But why were we scared? Well, it’s a
huge responsibility, of course, but more than that, what do we know about being
parents? The initial shock brought with it fears and concerns such as those that
I listed above, which we’ve devoted a lot of time and thought to over the
past few days. Having had time for things to sink in a bit, though, all the
positives are now starting to come to light. Sandy and I have an awful lot to be
thankful for. We have a stable and happy marriage; we’ve both enjoyed life
to the fullest and have travelled the world, lived in several countries on
different continents. We have a large and very loving family that spans the
world over. And yes, damn it; I’m sure we ‘will’ be great
parents! All those years of being a professional auntie and uncle (which is what
many of our twenty-three nephews and nieces call us) must surely have given us
some degree of understanding of children. I’ve watched my brothers and
sisters and in-laws all go through the process of raising children and that is a
wealth of knowledge and experience for us to fall back on if we need to.
Oftentimes, unplanned pregnancies will alters people’s lives greatly and I
frequently hear people tell me that having children is the biggest change in
their life and that it was very much more so than they expected. I’ve
heard told of how having kids has meant changing their lifestyle beyond
recognition and a few have even told of how this was not what they expected or
even wanted. If I look at our situation, however, we were already aiming for a
huge change in lifestyle one way or another. We had no concrete plans for what
direction to take with our lives after this trip. We knew that we would have to
find a place to live and start our new, post-travel lives again anyway.
Therefore, starting a family is no more or less of a change in lifestyle to what
would have happened had Sandy not become pregnant. Ergo, this is probably the
best time for us to start a family anyway. We’ve started before with
nothing, a couple of times, and we can do it again. Yes, we are older now but we
still have our household contents and furniture sitting locked away in
Sandy’s mother’s basement so we wouldn’t be starting from
absolute rock bottom this time.
So,
having finally come to the conclusion that we are both pleased with the
situation, we now have to turn to thinking about logistics. After all, we are
still on the other side of the planet, we still have no home and I still have no
job to return to. I’m extremely lucky to be equipped with a skill that is
portable, frequently in demand and, hopefully, that is still capable of drawing
respectable income. Sure, we would probably make do if this was not the case,
but it certainly can’t hurt either. A number of practical issues
immediately face us, and employment once we return home is not the primary one
at the moment. I’ll worry about that in the months ahead but right now, we
have to prioritise. More important is the fact that we are six months or more
from our scheduled return home. In six months time, Sandy will be very pregnant
and it cannot be a good thing for a pregnant woman to be carrying large
backpacks around with her, not to mention the stresses and strains of the
travelling lifestyle. No, we need to accelerate our return home. So, do we turn
around and book a flight immediately back to Europe? Well, that’s really
not necessary either. We’ve both decided that that we can still enjoy
visiting a select few of the remaining destinations on our planned itinerary as
we make our way back to Europe. Chiefly amongst these are finishing off visiting
Australia, New Zealand, Easter Island, the Galapagos Islands and Florida. We
have to pass through or near these places on the way back to Europe anyway and
with a few adjustments to the flight dates and routing, we can still have much
of our cake and eat it too. I called the airlines the day before yesterday and
they confirmed that we are able to make the necessary adjustments to the
itinerary without any problems. The nature of our round the world ticket ensures
this. They will charge us for the privilege and we still need to book the
necessary dates but it should all be possible. In making these changes, we are
by definition no longer going to be visiting some of our originally planned
destinations. For the most part, these will be islands of the South Pacific
region: Fiji, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands and Tahiti, although we will connect
through Tahiti on the way to Easter Island. We have separate tickets for those
flights and it remains to be seen if they are refundable for not using them. We
will also be passing up on visiting Chile, Machu Picchu in Peru and Mexico. On
the plus side, however, our accelerated trip back home will mean a huge savings.
By not spending money on visiting these places, we will hopefully be able to
return back home with somewhere between €10,000 and €15,000 in hand,
as opposed to nothing more than the contents of our backpacks and the need to
polish off my resume.
As I type, here
on the plane on the way from Cairns to Ayers Rock (Uluru), nobody else yet knows
of our good fortune. We are keeping it a secret until we return to Melbourne in
a couple of weeks. In a couple of days, we will be flying to Perth, were we have
an appointment to speak with a doctor. We’ve done some research on the
Internet about the Doxicycline issue and we’re not nearly as concerned now
as we first were but we still feel it necessary to go over this and other
pre-natal issues with a professional. We want to be in possession of all the
facts before we break the news to the rest of the family and I want for us to be
able to do that whilst in the company and familiar surroundings of family
too.
Taking a step back and looking
at the larger picture, we can’t help but feel that fate is somehow on our
side. We’ve really enjoyed our lives overall so far and have repeatedly
had some very good fortune. For example, we were in the Middle East after the
war had climaxed and settled down; we were standing on the twin towers a couple
of months before they came down; we were in Thailand just ten days before the
devastating tsunami struck. We seem to have magically missed all the bad things
that have happened in many of the countries around the world that we’ve
visited. To top it all off, we’ve been blessed with the good news that
Sandy is with child and we were even mysteriously upgraded to business class on
this flight just before boarding. Is someone trying to tell us
something?
One of the things
we’ve been thinking about over the past couple of days in particular has
been what to name our new child. We’ve thought about this in the past and
the unspoken agreement between us has always been that Sandy would name a boy
and that I would name a girl. We believe that December the twenty-fourth (Boxing
Day) to be about the time of conception. Should we call the child tsunami? No,
it will likely be Joey-Alexander, Joey-Anthony or Timothy for a boy and either
Stephanie-Doreen-Elizabeth or Jennifer-Elizabeth-Doreen for a girl (Doreen is my
mother’s name and Elizabeth is Sandy’s mother’s name). These
are the names that we’ve both liked for many years but we still have time
to change our minds.
Posted: Mon - January 24, 2005 at 10:49 PM