Michelle Day
It may seem like only a few weeks ago that I was on your screens, battling it out on the beaches of Northland on Celebrity Treasure Island, but in reality, I’ve been living in the States for four months now. I’m writing this from our old apartment in Los Angeles, where we lived before the pandemic.
After our daughter Roux turned one in June, my husband Millen Baird and I decided it was time to return to LA after two years back in New Zealand. The main driver was retaining our Green Cards, which allow us to live and work in the US, but also our feet were getting itchy.
We threw our oldest daughter Remy a slightly premature Frozen-themed fourth birthday party, complete with an Elsa cake that lit up and sang, then packed our bags for another trek across the world – this time with two kids in tow.
It didn’t quite start off as planned. First, we were turned away from the airport for not having the correct immigration documentation – but we actually did and the airline later apologised. Then after unsuccessfully trying to find a hotel for the night, we camped out for another three days at our friend’s house in Auckland, before being allowed to fly to the States.
Siobhan with daughters Roux (left) and Remy.
We kicked off our journey in beautiful Hawai’i. Honolulu was packed and it felt like COVID was a distant memory, with tourists knocking back cocktails and shopping up a storm. We had a lovely time, mainly swimming and shopping, and felt pretty rested when we landed in LA five days later.
It was great to be back in our lovely apartment. The storage unit our furniture had been in had been burgled, but luckily, the thieves didn’t take too much – and we were so happy to be back, it didn’t faze us.
We didn’t even mind sleeping on a musty old air mattress for the first week!
The acting duo keep the romance alive with regular date nights.
In a few days, the whole family was due to fly to Montreal for the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, where Millen and I were finalists in a competition for a new TV show we’re writing. However, sadly, it turned out COVID was not over for Remy, Roux and myself, who all succumbed to the virus.
Mills managed to fly to Montreal in the nick of time and avoided catching it, but that week was super-hard. We were still missing a car and a few vital pieces of furniture, like a dining table, and although we’d lived here two years earlier, the US health system is still a complete mystery to me.
Sitting pretty: The actress has big projects in the pipeline.
Fortunately, through my COVID-addled brain, I managed to get the kids seen by an urgent-care doctor, who also prescribed antibiotics to cure Remy’s chronic ear infection. And I managed to order a bright lime-green couch, which I somehow managed to drag into the apartment and assemble myself because I’d had to wave away the delivery men for safety reasons.
Happily, Mills won in Montreal – whoop! – and returned home, where we celebrated with a probiotic peppermint tea and a seven-hour sleep. Very rock ‘n’ roll, huh?
Feeling the heat in Hawai’i.
It’s hard having kids. We love them to the Moon and back, but trying to keep them healthy and happy, and also attempting to have some sort of career, is tricky. Maybe we find it particularly difficult because Mills and I are both in the entertainment industry.
Me spending five weeks away filming Celebrity Treasure Island in the Far North early this year was tough for Mills, who was on his own with a three-year-old and an eight-month-old baby, but luckily both grandmas were on hand to assist at random intervals.
While I was away, I was completely out of contact. Mills said it was like I’d died in a freak accident. But it was tough for me being away too, not knowing how they were going and if they were all OK. There were many restless nights lying in my tiny hessian sack bed in Northland, where I let my imagination get the better of me.
However, I loved the experience of CTI and I think it was really good for me to ‘get back to me’. Mills thinks it was great for him too – a challenge and a chance for him to spend some quality time with his girls. We watched the show from over here in LA, and Mills and the girls were really excited to watch me smash all the puzzles.
Siobhan made it to CTI’s top four.
Now we’re settled back in California, we’ve finally found a car (so essential), Remy loves her early childhood school and Roux is obsessed with all the dogs that live in our building. We’ve made a second trip to Hawai’i to celebrate a friend’s wedding and I trekked over to Texas, where my short film, Manny And Quinn, was up for an award at the Austin Film Festival.
While I was away, Remy and Roux relished dressing up as Princess Sofia and a pumpkin for Halloween, while Mills and our good friend Darren, who was visiting from New Zealand, dressed up as two sparkly unicorns and took the kids trick-or-treating. They got so much sugar and I’m gutted I missed it!
As always in LA, life is filled with ups and downs. It seems more extreme than life in Aotearoa and the days fly by quickly, but then I can’t believe we’ve only been back four months. Another bout of COVID kept us isolated for a second stint, so it feels like a topsy-turvy stop-start return to the good ole US of A.
Remy was mesmerised by her Elsa birthday cake.
We really miss you, New Zealand. Thank you for that amazing almost-COVID-free two years. We feel very lucky and are excited to return in February for a couple of months to film some more projects.
But for now, we’ll keep on keeping on, forging ahead, while balancing parenting duties, creating, acting and living. We’ll try to keep up with date nights, play dates, auditions, writing sessions, meetings, ballet classes, music lessons and catching up with good friends.
Siobhan keeps the girls busy with ballet and music lessons.
Fortunately, we have a raft of reliable babysitters, and we make sure we have projects that motivate us and always have something fun on the horizon at all times. That’s our life right now – full, challenging and happy.”
