Adventures in
Serendipity

This May, I traveled abroad alone for the very first time since becoming a parent. This rare opportunity was the result of needing to do some archival research at the British Library in London and the Museum of Rural English Life in Reading. I actually prefer traveling with Ryan and my toddler, but time-off and budgets did not align, so my trek across the pond was solo (and fully funded by my college). While I was initially not too happy about this prospect, my time in England reminded me, after ten years of traveling with Ryan and friends, that I am capable of hard things, that I like spending time with myself doing what I like to do, and that I can read a book extremely fast when I’m not interrupted every five seconds!

If you’ve been a long-time follower of the blog (or know me personally), you might remember that I last visited Ireland in 2017 as a new college graduate on a whirlwind backpacking trip with one of my oldest friends. On that trip, not only was I a fresh-faced, sprightly new college grad, but I was on an incredibly tight budget and visiting in the summer. This time, I approached my visit to Ireland as an exhausted toddler-mom with a slightly larger budget and less flexibility, and we also had to navigate the various difficulties of Irish winter weather.

Unsurprisingly (at least to those familiar with my daily life), I missed my annual year in review post for 2024. I had my daughter in the fall of 2023, then scraped together my last remaining brain cells to balance teaching and finishing my dissertation in 2024. Fall 2024 was also when we lost Argos, my soul dog whom I’d had since childhood; he survived osteosarcoma against every odd but died unexpectedly in his sleep from a heart condition. In the midst of parenting, dissertating, and grief, a year in review post on my now seldom-used blog was not at the top of my priorities list.

One of the things I’ll emphasize throughout this post is how much money you will save by going the more sustainable route (hint: it’s A LOT), but it is by no means the only positive outcome. By being a conscious consumer, you’re creating less waste, making a more stress-free environment for both you and baby, choosing materials and ingredients that are best for baby’s health and development, and more. Babies don’t actually need that much stuff and while we’re by no means minimalists, one of the first sustainable choices we made was to forgo a lot of the extraneous baby things that our consumerist society tells you that you need (even though you really don’t).

The last time Ryan and I went to Hawai’i, it was for our honeymoon in 2021, and we visited the Big Island and Kauai (read about that trip here). This spring, when we found out we were expecting our baby girl, the first big plans that we wanted to make were for our babymoon, and we figured what better place to go to celebrate our growing family than where we celebrated our marriage. Flights were cheapest to the Big Island (by several hundred dollars) and since it was our favorite island, we opted to return there for a few of the days on our trip. The other part of our time, we wanted to explore a new island, and we decided on Maui.