There is a “front door rule” that means that the position of the front door determines whether a house is classified as being in Belgium or the Netherlands. The nationality of the home is also indicated by a flag next to the house number. We visited the house in which the border goes straight through the middle of the door, and thus has two addresses (and two doorbells):

Loveren 2
2387 Baarle-Hertog
Belgium

and

Loveren 19
5111 Baarle-Nassau
The Netherlands

There was even a divisive border across my lunch, separating the savoury cheese and potato pancake from the sweet cherry crepe. I ate each in isolation and they were delicious.

Plus, JT hand-delivered to us a delicious Black & White cookie, all the way from New York City. Hayden is still too little, so I ate it for him.

When it was our time to ride the elephants, Hayden had fallen fast asleep. I think he liked the gentle bumping along the jungle paths while snuggled up against Adrian’s chest. I was told that my elephant was extra tall because his mother was Sumatran while his father was from Thailand. The two elephant handlers were really kind to us, taking a lot of extra time to line up the two animals, and then even hopping off to take some great shots. I was really impressed with their consideration and patience.

We also met a yellow python – Hayden’s second snake experience – though we didn’t let it get too close to him, as those strong muscles aren’t just for show. Hayden also slept through this encounter.

In the afternoon, Milly from the elephant park visited the hotel. I watched her give short rides to all the kids, and took photos for many families as they made a short circuit around the grass. Once the queue had vanished, the handler let me meet Milly and feed her tiny Indonesian bananas. She was very patient, stretching out her mottled pink and grey trunk and waiting for me to place the fruit in her finger-like projection. She never grabbed the banana from my hand, though she did snortle and sniff at me thoroughly after each one to see if any more were waiting for her. After stroking her hairy trunk I said good-bye and thanked her for being such a gentle and delightful creature.

Today we spent the whole day at Club Med Bintan Indonesia. We started the day with a nature walk through the thick jungle that surrounds the resort. We spotted a wild silver-leaf monkey, a centipede, and some carnivorous pitcher plants.

At lunch we let Hayden play with a few more foods. He can now pick them up and wave them around, and sometimes he will almost accidentally shove them into his mouth, but he really doesn’t seem that interested in eating and seems quite happy with his liquid diet.

We have been eating so much fresh fruit here – pineapple, watermelon, dragon fruit, snake skin fruit, guava, coconut – for every meal it’s freshly sliced and waiting for us in abundance. Hayden gummed on some coconut but didn’t seem particularly impressed.

It was a little drizzly, which meant that some activities were cancelled, a great excuse to curl up with Hayden and read our books while sipping on some cocktails. Hayden modelled the seahorse t-shirt that I painted for him the day before. Even though I chose an extra-small shirt, it is too big and he looks a little like an American footballer. Poor little bear is even too small for the Petite Club.

In some ways this place is very baby-friendly. They have plenty of high-chairs and changing stations with Johnson & Johnson products, and the buffet has a whole fridge full of pureed baby foods. We have a baby bath, a bottle warmer and steriliser in our room with more complementary baby skin care products on offer. However at 14 years old the resort is showing its age, as there are stairs everywhere and it is impossible to wheel the pram anywhere without assistance. We saw one little girl in a wheelchair, and she must be having a very difficult time getting around.

Overall we have enjoyed our time here. During monsoon season the beach and the weather are not spectacular, but it is warm and relaxing and a great excuse to spend some quality time together. Tomorrow we catch the ferry back to Singapore and the next day we fly back home.

I also introduced Hayden to Mira the Mexican milk snake.

Singapore zoo has a very successful breeding program, with around 300 births and hatchings of 44 species in the last year, including Hamadryas Baboons, cotton-top tamarins, pygmy hippopotamus, Douc langurs, proboscis monkeys, meerkats, manatees, komodo dragons, spotted mousedeer, oriental small-clawed otters, Chinese stripe-necked turtles and Linne’s two-toed sloths. There were zoo-borns everywhere, it was so delightful to see so many different species flourishing in lush and spacious enclosures.

I bought Hayden a small jar of “my first Vegemite” to try on his first birthday. Though Adrian says that the reduced salt will detract from the true Australian experience.

There are some downsides to shopping in Australia, though. This is the extent of the foreign beer selection:

And if one takes a close look at a bottle of Stella:

It’s made by Fosters.

Every morning, mum and I would take a walk to the beach, strolling along the boulevard and watching the fierce waves crash against the shore. With oil tankers dotted across the horizon, the surf lifesavers would scout the tides every morning to determine the safest place to swim – “always swim between the flags” was one of the anthems of my childhood.

We were also able to spend some time with my Nana, Hayden’s great-grandmother. Hayden loved to watch her clap her hands, and I was able to hear her stories of raising five children while working as a journalist. With a single wriggling baby in my hands, I have no idea how she managed to balance it all, especially back in the day of cloth nappies and no dishwashers. It was so fantastic to be able to spend a week relaxing with mum Nana and Hayden playing together, and to show them our adorable baby boy.

Once we had stabilised, the flight attendants brought out a 70cm-long basinette for him and bolted it to the wall. It was just perfect. He slept very happily in it, for nearly six hours in a row on both flights. If awake, he was content to just gurgle and play with his hands, which meant that we had room to eat and stretch out too. KLM made us take him out whenever the seatbelt light was on, but Malaysia Airlines had a zip-up top on their basinettes that meant that we could keep him in there throughout the flight.

Until he is two, Hayden costs 10% plus taxes to travel with us. If he continues to fly as well as he does now, I look forward to taking him on many more international adventures.

While Adrian and his students presented their work to an international crowd, Hayden and I took long walks along the canals. The air was brisk but most days we had beautiful blue skies that were perfect for sightseeing. Once the talks had finished for the day we met up with Adrian and his colleagues to talk science over a few beers.

We had breakfast each morning in the elegant Winter Garden of the hotel – a huge glass-roofed room built in 1881 and filled with tropical ferns and a long buffet table filled with tempting treats. I started each day with poffertjes (tiny pancakes) with sour cherry sauce, and ended the day with poffertjes with maple syrup.

In between pancakes we managed to do some shoe shopping, as well as visiting the Wetheimpark and the Resistance Museum. A lovely way to mark the end of my maternity leave and squeeze in one more mini break before I go back to work next week.

Thanks to Grant for taking the photo.

We were all suffering due to the heatwave – unbearable highs of 28 both days. Hayden did not make the best first impression, and while all three of us turned up at their home sweaty, dehydrated, and cranky, only one of us was screaming. Yet they took us in and fed us delicious and locally sourced meals – quiche with spinach from their allotment, pancakes with home made wild berry jam, pizza with home-grown capsicum, and stewed apples picked the day before.

We spent most of the weekend outdoors, with a barbeque by the Cam one day and a long walk along the river the next. We walked from Cambridge to Fen Ditton, past cows on the commons, dozens of rowers, and families at home on their houseboats. Cambridge is such an idyllic town, with the energy of the university and the tranquility of the countryside synergising into a dynamic yet peaceful place.

We started the day at the Foundling Museum, built on the site of the old Foundling Hospital. Established in 1741 by sea captain Thomas Coram, it provided a home for children who were deserted under the age of one. For the first five years of their life, they were fostered out to farming families who lived in the region, breastfed by wet nurses and often treated as one of the family. However in their fifth year of life they were abruptly transferred to the Hospital, where they were dressed in uniforms indicative of their future careers – miniature military-style uniforms for the boys and domestic servants’ uniforms for the girls.

Most of these children were illegitimate, given up by their mothers to save their reputation. An unwed woman with a child was seen as morally repugnant, and often would no longer be able to find work. Often these women would continue to write to the hospital for years, inquiring about their child’s health and sending gifts. These letters were rarely passed onto the children until recently, often after the mother had passed away. There were so many women petitioning the hospital that a lottery system was initiated. I put Hayden in the lottery and he was admitted to the Hospital pending a medical review.

After our tour of the museum and an excellent caramel slice in the cafe, Hayden and I took a short walk to the Coram’s Fields Park, also on the site of the Foundling Hospital. As no adults are permitted without children, it was my first time inside. Filled with children running barefoot through the fountains, I took Hayden to see his first goats, chickens, and rabbits at the petting zoo. He wasn’t terribly impressed, but he loved spending the day out and about in the stroller and in my arms. He was in an exceptionally good mood all day, charming strangers with smiles and giggles. One of the best days he and I have had together, a glorious way to enjoy the sunshine.

When we checked in at the hotel yesterday, they told us they would guarantee a good night’s sleep or give us our money back. I laughed and pointed to our cranky little peanut and told them it looks like we’ll be staying for free.

Airport security let him stay in his baby carrier as we passed through the metal detectors, Brussels Airlines ushered us on first and took care of our stroller, and Vincent the flight attended thought that Hayden was so adorable that he gifted him with an autographed bib.

I think that Hayden enjoyed his trip very much. If he wasn’t being lulled to sleep by the gentle motion of the train or the ship, he was bumping along in his stroller or nestled up against us in his baby carrier. Lots of fresh air, new sights, and friendly strangers chatting away to him in exotic tongues, he was better behaved than when he is at home cooped up inside with us. I’m sure that logistics will be more difficult once he starts crawling, but at the moment he is a great travel companion.

In contrast, the MS Versteralen was a great fit for us. Built in 1983 and refitted in 1995, she has 306 cabins to hold 510 passengers, and has a cruise speed of 15 knots (28 km/hr). As soon as we boarded, Hayden was welcomed aboard and given his own passenger ID card to use when disembarking and embarking at the ports. We were able to check immediately into our cabin, complete with old-fashioned porthole. It made things so easy to have a home base to shower, sleep, and change Hayden whenever we wished.

The Hurtigruten ferry route has its origins back in 1891 when the government put out a tender for an express route between Trondheim and Hammerfest, as at the time it took three weeks for a letter to travel between these two ports in summer and five months in winter. In 1893 Captain Richard With took the DS Vesterålen on her first tour from Trondheim to Hammerfest in only two days and nineteen hours. Today the same trip takes one day and seventeen hours, and is still subsidised by the government.

Sadly we didn’t have time to cross the Arctic Circle, and just took a 28 hour trip from Trondheim to Bergen, with a quick stroll through Molde while the ship was docked there. When our southbound ship entered a port during the day it would signal its arrival with two long, one short, and one long whistle blast (the Morse code for Q), while a northbound ship signals with one long, one short, and one long blast (Morse code for K). The ships also do this when they meet in a shipping line, with the northbound ship always greeting first. As we listened to this noisy announcement while pulling into port, Adrian noted that one would always know when it was 4:30pm in Kristriansund.

The scenery was spectacular. We could sit out on the deck or in the salon as islands of all shapes and sizes would drift past us. Inland the houses seemed to be painted muted earthy colours, however the coastal regions were edged with a whole spectrum of bright homes. Tiny white lighthouses could be spotted on rocky outcroppings to help the ships find their way between the islands.

Hayden was the youngest little sailor on the ship. He charmed many of the staff and passengers, and he spent quite a while in their arms looking at them in wonder as they chatted to him in Norwegian. Even when I went down to the gift shop on my own, the woman asked how the baby was doing and happily spent some time with me helping me pick out the best stamps for my postcards, describing the location of each scene and even finding the official MS Vesteralen stamp for postage within Europe.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time aboard the Hurtigruten and would love to return to these ships for a longer voyage. Once a year in Autumn they have a specially built ship that spends two weeks travelling from Spitsbergen to Greenland to Iceland. What an experience.

Note: Today there was a fire in the engine room on another Hurtigruten ship, the MS Nordlys. Two crew members were killed and four injured. All the Hurtigruten staff that we met were considerate, professional, so very kind and accommodating. My thoughts are with their families.

Efteling
Netherlands
One of the world’s oldest theme parks that first opened its doors in 1952. In winter, it is a fairy tale forest with a castle hotel and pine trees decorated with thousands of lights. In summer, it comes alive with shows and rides, including PandaVision and the dark water ride the Flying Dutchman.

Legoland
Denmark
Located next to the original Lego factory, it includes Duplo Land, ImaginationZone, LEGOREDO Town, Adventure Land, Miniland, Pirate Land, Lego City, Knights Kingdom and Viking land. Their website promises me that Pirate Land will deliver “a truly authentic atmosphere that includes everything from ship-wrecked pirates to ferocious crocodiles and sharks.”

Futuroscope
France
A land of the future. As well as numerous IMAX theatres and traditional rides, it also features the augmented reality adventure based on the BBC’s The Future is Wild that takes us through evolution from 200 million years in the past to 200 million years into the future. Plus, It even has a Robot Pavillion with a Robot Zoo.

Nigloland
France
I don’t know much about this little park, however a whole land with a hedgehog theme has to bode well. During summer there is a Poodle Parade, as well as a Dinosaur Adventure, Flying Dragons, and a Bat Coaster.

Europa-Park
Germany
Not to be confused with Europark (the Scandinavian division of APCOA Parking), Europ-Park is the largest theme park in Germany. Its mascot is Euromaus, a mouse in Blue EU overalls, and in the FoodLoop restaurant your meal arrives in pots on a tiny rollercoaster. In addition to ten people-sized roller coasters, one can also find an Ice Show in Greece, a Gladiator Arena Show in Spain, an Acrobatics Show in Italy, and a full scale replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in England.

Dickens’ World
England
Inside a vast aluminium hangar, the world of Charles Dickens is recreated – a warren of dingy, gaslit cobbled streets and old inn yards, gloomy prison facades and sooty brick walls. Inside the schoolhouse there is mouldy, crumbling plasterwork, grim little wooden desks and stern admonitions scrolling round the walls: Respect Thy Elders; Be Seen and Not Heard. The high point of the theme park is surely the dark boat ride through the filthy backwaters of the Thames, complete with animatronic rats swimming in the dyed-brown water and a ragged boy glimpsed peeing in a darkened creek.

Roses cast by mourners float in the lake near the island of Utoya, Norway, on July 24, 2011. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)