We landed in Cebu on the 8th of December 2020 with a four-month-old under one arm and a mountain of quarantine paperwork under the other. Covid had other plans for our homecoming, so instead of the tearful airport reunion we’d been picturing for months – Adrija meeting her grandparents for the very first time – we were bundled straight into the Cebu Beach Club for two weeks of government-mandated isolation. Views of the sea, at least, softened the blow. Just me, Clare and Adrija, a room in a beach resort, and a baby who had recently discovered that shouting is a legitimate form of communication.
Quarantine with an infant is its own special genre of chaos. We turned the resort room bed into an obstacle course, invented increasingly elaborate games involving room service trays, and marked off the days like prisoners scratching tally marks into a cell wall (if the cell had a sea view and a rather good mango shake on the menu). Adrija, blissfully unaware that the whole point of this trip was two flights and fourteen days away, spent the week perfecting her new party trick of trying to hold her own head up.
By the time we were finally sprung on the 21st of December, thirteen days after landing, we were more than ready to swap the resort room for the rest of the family. Mum was waiting for us, and the moment she got her hands on Adrija I understood why we’d put up with two weeks of room service and baby-proofed resort furniture. It was worth every long, shouty afternoon.
Christmas Eve brought the second reunion: my sister Shiv and Dad touched down that evening, and the house exploded into the kind of noise you only get when a family that hasn’t been in the same room for over a year is suddenly, finally, all under one roof again. There was a lot of hugging, Shiv and Dad meeting Adrija for the very first time, and at least one photo taken every ninety seconds for the rest of the night – I know because I’ve got the timestamps to prove it.
Christmas Day itself was the whole reason we’d put ourselves through fourteen days of resort purgatory. Dad and Mum got their first proper cuddles with their granddaughter, Shiv got to play favourite aunt for the first time in person, and Adrija – entirely unbothered by the significance of the occasion – mostly just wanted to grab everyone’s glasses off their faces. We ate too much, took roughly four hundred photos of five people rearranging themselves on the same sofa, and generally did what every family does on Christmas Day: argued gently about where to stand for the group photo.
The days that followed blurred into the best kind of ordinary – lazy mornings, family lunches, Adrija being passed round like the most popular parcel at the world’s slowest game of pass-the-parcel, and Dad and Mum soaking up every second of grandparent time they’d been robbed of for the best part of a year. We rang in the New Year together on the 1st of January, which felt like exactly the right way to close out a year that had otherwise been determined to keep us apart.
By the time we packed up in early January, Adrija had gone from a baby who’d never met her grandparents to one who lit up every time Dad walked into a room. Fourteen days of quarantine to get three weeks of family time – on paper that’s a terrible trade, but ask any of us and we’d do it again in a heartbeat.
