14 years ago I went on a simple 3 day cruise with my 3 best girls. We traveled south from Atlanta, young and excited to be away from home together – in international waters- dreaming of tans and girl talk and maybe a few never-before-legally-tasted cocktails. At the same time a family in Wisconsin started a parallel journey to the same Miami port, the same ship, and ultimately, the same dinner table to which we were headed. Brian tells me he remembers sitting at the dinner table that first night with his parents and seeing us file in. All he could think was please sit here. Fate played along (or at the very least a skilled cruise director who could see the merits of the single group of 18 year olds on board sitting at the only other table with anyone under 40 at it) and we found our seats. He and I found our futures.
Over the past 14 years Brian and I have followed one another around the country and the world. His home base has always been Wisconsin but he’s spent the better part of half those years with me while my address changed from Atlanta to Massachusetts to Wisconsin and even to Via Baldesi 24 Firenze, Italia. I’m a restless world traveler, always eyeing a new destination, while he’s the one who ultimately makes each voyage meaningful. He secretly learned italian to impress me, proposed in a Florentine piazza, flew to see me in Atlanta every weekend for nearly a year, and he’s said yes let’s do it every time I’ve asked him if he wants to go see Japan or Morocco or London or any big ball of twine the world has to offer. For us travel has become a way to say ~
I love you. I want to spend time with you. I want to be a part of this big wonderful world with you.
So now we are having a baby and we have to get this kid up to speed. We’re not finding out if it is a boy or a girl; we’re just counting on the fact that its an explorer and a traveler and it will want me to read National Geographics as bedtime stories. Maybe, just maybe, our baby will very quickly understand the nursery where we are putting up maps and globes, decorating with trinkets collected on foreign travels, filling shelves with stacks of National Geographics and Italian nursery rhyme books is the only way we know how to say ~
Baby, I love you. I want to spend time with you. I want to be a part of this big wonderful world with you.
One of the lovely and perfect details we are putting in the baby’s room is a little picture ledge featuring three important Nat Geos: back issues from my and Brian’s birth month/year and then this year’s issue from September or October, whichever month in which the baby decides to debut. I ordered our issues from a great little bookstore out west and am happily shocked by the appropriateness of our issues. Yep, mine is a gorilla with a camera (and that’s me in my chimp-with-a-polaroid-tee I already owned). I’m not sure what kind of cover I’m hoping the baby has, but whatever it is I’m sure it will tell me the kid is going to be really, really cool.
Brian has been turning the camera on my expanding belly each month now, but we wanted very much to have photos together. Enter my friend, fellow traveler and photographer Caca´who traveled to Milwaukee to help me make these personal maternity photos happen. We collaborated on the shoot together and I edited these favorites. Thank you to both Brian and Caca´for helping make my vision a reality. Baci, Beijos, XoXo.
