Hellllo fellow Vino Vagabonds! I know it’s been ages since I’ve written, but we’ve been a bit busy over here…MAKING A BABY! If you follow us on social media (which you should BTW) you probably know that our beautiful daughter, Indiana Rose Didra*, was born on July 31, 2018, and for the last few months, we’ve been hunkered down in Babytown, learning the ropes as new parents and re-configuring our lives as a party of three.

This little angel-baby has already brought so much joy, fun, craziness, exhaustion, and poop (oh the poop) into our lives, and while everyone says your life will change when you have a child, you don’t really get it until you actually have one. But to simply say parenthood is a “change” is a gross understatement...It’s been and continues to be the most challenging, rewarding, exciting, scary adventure we’ve ever embarked upon and I know this is only the beginning. From sleepless nights and endless feedings, to blown-out diapers, man-sized burps and getting that first smile, it has been a wild road of highs, lows, and lots of hairpin turns.

But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that compares to the love we feel for this little being, and seeing the world open up before her wide blue eyes keeps us in a state of constant awe. She’s continuously reminding us that you don’t have to travel far to see life’s treasures. To her, everyday occurrences that we’ve come to find mundane: the soft pattern of light shining through the curtains, the twinkle of a chandelier, the hum of a slowly spinning fan, or a green spiky plant are all immensely captivating and attract her undivided attention. She stares, entranced, at every aspect of life around her, especially at us as we smile and coo, trying to figure it out and often furrowing her little brow or mimicking our movements.

Everything is so new to her and it’s incredible. I mean can you remember the first time you felt and smelled rain? The first time you noticed the contrast between the light blue sky and dark silhouette of a tree? How about your first sunset? Or the moment you discovered your hands were attached to your body and under your control? She is living in a world of firsts and every day she wakes up with new senses and perspectives she didn’t have the night before.

In essence, she’s traveling in a new world every single day…with us as her local guides.

And guiding her as she navigates each new phase of life is the single most important privilege and greatest responsibility of our lives because we know that each experience she has forms the foundation of who she will become and who she will ultimately be in the world. Right now she is only love. She hasn’t yet developed the ability to manipulate, to lie, to judge or discriminate and she doesn’t know a thing about politics, violence, inequality or terror. All she knows is pure love and vulnerability and absolute presence. She is fully immersed in each moment and emanates unconditional oneness and acceptance for everyone. I know this will inevitably change since we cannot and do not want to keep her sheltered all her life, but I do feel that it’s our divine responsibility to keep her as close to this state as possible…to simply not ‘mess up’ too much the perfection that the universe has entrusted to our keeping.

And we feel that showing her this wonderful, wild world with it’s vast array of cultures, colors, landscapes, species and environments is the best way to do this. To show her as early as possible that we as humans are much more alike than we are different and that all living beings, from people to plants, are worth protecting.

Right now, our exploration is mostly confined to our living room, backyard and neighborhood, but there will come a time, not long from now, when her consciousness and curiosity will expand beyond our home and stretch deeper into the wide world around her. A time when, hand in hand, we step outside the comfortable bounds of our hometown, our state and our country into the wild blue yonder…and thus the adventure will truly begin.

*Vino Vagabond Insider Note:

We named her Indiana in honor of the greatest, most bad-ass adventurer of all time, Indiana Jones, and we chose Rose as her middle name to remind her that no matter how far and wide she travels, may she always remain rooted in the present and remember to smell the roses. <3