Preface

Left to Right: Jes, Madhu & Baby Nio

For those who don't know us, our names are Jes and Madhu, we live in NY and as from the picture you may have deducted (or not) that we are a lesbian couple and just welcomed our first child Nio in Oct, 2018. We also call ourselves the "Gradient" Family because of the color spectrum of diversity under the same roof. Nuff said about us, let's talk about what this blog is about. This blog is about our travel stories in 2019 with an INFANT. One may ask, what were we thinking? The truth is, we weren't really thinking, we were high from life one evening and decided that we are going to travel every month for the whole year. Full disclosure, part of the idea came when Jes was asked to travel for work in the months of Feb and March, mandatory travels are fun aren't they!? Nio being just 4 month old, Jes exclusively BF, pumping, and returning to work after her maternity leave of 4 month right into a traveling gig - we were struggling to figure out whether she should go on her own or we all should travel. In the spur of the moment we decided that we will all come with her and figure everything out later. It's one way to do things, in all certainty, this strategy will always lead to having more life experiences. In our books, it's all good, sure there will be challenges (many challenges) but we were determined to overcome each one of them. Our time together with Nio was too precious, besides, we were also thrilled to take Nio around the country and maybe the world? (ambition vs wisdom check). So while we had to travel twice in two months for work, and Jan we had already taken a trip to Catskills for Madhu's birthday, we were like, wait, this run must not be broken. We truly set something in motion - so we set out to plan our next 9 trips. You read that right, 12 travels in 12 months, with an INFANT! Names of places went on a whiteboard, we looked at our flight credits, we looked at distance, work time off situation for each of us, deliberated on mode of travel and spent many hours into the evening planning our epic journeys. This blog captures our highs, lows and the mediums of our adventures (and pictures). Last but not least, there is one more of our family member, our potbelly pig Einstein. He is a year and a half, and lives in his comfy home in our yard. Because he is his own pig, and is loving his new found independence in our yard, we are thinking of getting him his own postal code. Here he is doing what he does best, eating.

@thestein2017

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