Have Baby, will not Travel

Chuck’s humblest apologies, dear readers, for the lack of activity last week, but Chuck was on the road. Many of you will be choking on your skinny latte at that weak excuse since Chuck’s other role as a successful businessman sees him travelling frequently yet he makes the time to dish advice on a regular basis. The difference on this trip was that Chuck was travelling in a new capacity – father; and fuck Chuck drunk, it’s not easy.

A couple of key points to consider before Chuck moves on:

1)    Mrs Long does the vast majority of the heavy lifting – early morning feeding and nappy changing in particular.

2)    The spawn of Chuck is incredibly good natured.

You’d think that with the two above points in play, travelling with an infant would be a breeze but Chuck’s here to tell you that the logistics required to take a baby on a plane and to a holiday destination would make the preparations for the Olympic opening ceremony pale in comparison – put it this way, Chuck wasn’t calling in any of the Indian Commonwealth Games organisers for assistance.

What’s so hard you ask? Where the fuck should Chuck start? Typically you’re told to be 60 minutes early for domestic and 90 minutes for international flights. The moment you add an infant to this mix, you simply have to tack another 2 hours onto things. The first nightmare is the packing. Baby Chuck averages at least 4 outfits per day (mainly because Chuck and Mrs Long have made the bold decision to remove any clothing that has faeces, urine or vomit on it unlike other more contemporary parents: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/01/3027558.htm). So when travelling for 5 days, you’re talking 20 outfits right there. On top of this you have nappies, wipes, sleeping bags, hats and a whole range of other assorted goodies. Now Chuck is a chronic over-packer at the best of times but scoffed when he saw how much stuff Mrs Long set aside to take on the trip. Low and behold, the baby churned through the entire stash. Fuck knows why Brad and Angelina are on the road as much as they are with the piles of crap they’d have to lug around for their brood.

Despite the Spawn of Chuck being incredibly good-natured, her favourite things to do at 3 months of age in no particular order are: vomit, poo & wee. Oh and she loves to smile. She is so radically unpredictable on all of these things other than smiling that you cannot plan ahead. You can clean a monster turd, put a new nappy on, and redress her (and do not get Chuck started on the complexity of children’s clothing. Bugger child proof lids on medicine, they should wrap the drugs up in a baby one-piece night suit. The thing is like a fucking rubics cube) and not 3 minutes later comes the sound of her internal cappuccino machine as she bubbles up a fresh new turd. On both the departing and arriving flights, little Miss Long cooked up a steamer within 10 minutes of take off. Of course you could smell the stench seeping from her with no course of action possible until the seat belt sign went off.

The sheer volume of bodily fluid that comes out of an infant is shocking. Being moderately refined, Chuck and Mrs Long are loathe to leave her in her own dishcharges meaning countless hours are spent searching for baby change rooms so that she can be hosed down and repackaged.

Another critical thing to consider when flying with a baby is the pressure build up in her ears. The take offs and landings are obviously the critical part and if the baby’s ears don’t equalise, the poor little thing’s head will feel like exploding. Chuck was horrified when he realized he couldn’t just slip her a stick of gum and let her chew her way to equilibrium. No, Mrs Long had to perfectly time breastfeeding with take-offs and landing. Apparently the sucking action acts as a mechanism to relieve the pressure (Chuck will be sure to remember to suck on a titty the next time he needs to relieve some pressure). Unfortunately, if the plane is not on time or you have to taxi to a far runway, feeding times may not line up in which case a nipple has to be offered up for sacrifice so that the baby can suckle and avoid the dreaded ear ache.

Eating out is a massive challenge with a young child. Ordinarily, Chuck would just leave the baby in the hotel room and head out for a meal, but that’s been frowned upon heavily since a kid got nicked out of a room in Portugal. Option number 2 would be driving to the casino and leaving it in the car park but the holiday destination was casino-less. So with out a go-to plan, Chuck had to scout out restaurants that were deemed baby friendly. How did Chuck do that you ask? Well the obvious idea would be to go to a restaurant with no one in it, but an empty restaurant would suggest that either the food is terrible or their speciality is salmonella. Actually it was pretty simple, Chuck just walked in to the restaurant and asked if they had room for a pram.  The tricky part is getting the child to sleep just as the mains arrive (or to have Mrs Long grab her and walk her outside until she fell asleep).

Probably the biggest challenge is stifling the baby’s cries once in the air. Chuck has been on plenty of flights with screaming babies and frankly it isn’t a great concern. However, the minute you have one of your own you suddenly become so worried that her cries are upsetting people that you actually consider smothering the baby’s face with a pillow (Chuck jokes, although the airline we were on didn’t supply pillows so it was never an option). Chuck isn’t really sure why you start to worry about how others perceive your baby’s cries, but at 2am Chuck will do anything to calm the baby so as not to disturb the next door neighbours (yeah the same neighbours who think nothing of having band practice at midnight or better yet, hold a Skype conversation without head phones on our front door step – fuck those fuckers!).

Seriously, no measure of good planning can totally equip you for the challenges you face when travelling with a baby. The upside to all of these challenges is that you get to take your baby on her first family holiday. Perhaps next time, Chuck will encourage Mrs Long to take some extra time and let her travel ahead with the baby.

Clothes make the man.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

-      Mark Twain

Dear Chuck,

My boyfriend has his very own style, which I really like (jeans, chequered shirt and converse all-stars are standard fare). I have a work function coming up where partners are encouraged to attend and the dress code is semi formal. All of the firm’s hierarchy will be there and I really need my boyfriend to look sharp. The two issues I have are that my boyfriend doesn’t own a suit and would be so uncomfortable wearing one that he probably wouldn’t enjoy himself.

As a man of sharp sartorial tastes, do you have any suggestions on how he could dress comfortably but still look really good?

Lisa

Dear Lisa,

Wasn’t this scenario played out in an episode of Sex in the City? Ignore the fact that Chuck just displayed an uncanny recall of a chick television show and focus on how that played out: Miranda took her bartender boyfriend out to buy him a suit, he felt uncomfortable having her pay, insisted on paying for it himself then crumbled under the weight of the cost. Steve decided he was out of Miranda’s league and they broke up. Or something vaguely resembling that scenario, Chuck cant really remember the specifics.

You could follow the above example or you could bring your boyfriend along in his jeans / shirt / sneaker combo, but you’ll likely torpedo your career in front of the company higher ups as they instantly realise that you’re dating a fuck knuckle who doesn’t understand dress codes and you don’t have the influence to make him. Some sort of leader you’d be if you couldn’t even control your man when you have the power of pussy over him!

That’s what they’d think anyway.

So how do you get Cinderella to the ball? If your dude doesn’t require a suit in his job, then it seems pointless to go and buy one, although according to Chuck’s principles of life, every bloke should own at least one: every guy faces a time that he requires a suit - weddings, funerals, partner work functions.

If purchasing a suit is not something that sits well and he’d rather spend his hard earned on a nice cardigan or some other item from the Kurt Cobain fashion catalogue that he gets his ‘very own style’ from then you have a couple of other options. Option 1 is renting a suit although just typing that is enough to make Chuck vomit in his own mouth. Do you realise how much DNA is in a rented suit? You could dry clean a rented suit with napalm and Chuck would still never wear one. Think about rented suits – the only time they are ever worn (high school dances & weddings), the bloke generally gets laid or at least engages in some form of heavy petting. Those suits have enough semen samples in them to power an entire episode of CSI.

The second option is to borrow one off a mate. Now in bloke-world borrowing a suit is totally acceptable on the proviso that it is returned dry cleaned with the standard male payment of a carton of beer. Sure there is a chance that there’ll be DNA in the suit but at least you’ll know who the father is.

There really isn’t any other way around this issue Chuck is afraid. If your boyfriend tries to go alternative chic by wearing skinny black jeans, white shirt, skinny tie and faux ye olde leather jacket he’ll just look like a knob who didn’t have the brain power to find a suit for a semi formal event. This in turn will reflect poorly upon you. It comes off being disrespectful and you’ll be tarred with that brush no matter how much time and effort you put into your frock. Ignoring dress codes to events is one of Chuck’s pet peeves actually. If the organiser has gone to the effort of stating a dress code, how hard is it to follow through on that request? If someone doesn’t want to follow the dress code, they really shouldn’t show up.

And that Lisa is the reality of the situation. If your boyfriend doesn’t feel comfortable wearing a suit and it’s going to ruin his evening then A) you probably need to leave him at home and B) get his head checked. It’s only a pair of pants and a fucking jacket with shoulder pads in it!