Three years: Growing up while living and traveling around the world!

It's been over three years since we left Innsbruck in July 2017 when we decided to travel and live around the world with Nora. She was four months old when we started this journey, and now we have another baby, Nina, who joined us in November 2019. Many of our friends, family, and acquaintances frequently ask how it is to travel with a baby, and what challenges we face as we are moving from city to city, country to country with an infant/toddler. Many also asked if it is harmful for the child's development to not have a stable base and call a place Home. It's not always easy to explain the reasons behind the path we chose to live & travel around the world with our babies. But through these articles on our blog we make an effort to share some insights into our journey and share details about how we are creating an environment where our children are able to experience the world, develop identities, and meet their physical and psychological needs along the way. 

As others can see our journey only through the lens of their own personal experience of raising kids or from a general view of how they see kids being raised in their communities and surrounding cultures, we might come across to many people as parents who are doing something uncommon compared to the "right" way of doing things. This view in-turn raises fears and anxiety in them regarding what might happen to our kids and their futures if they don't follow the traditional path. We try to address these concerns as much as we can during our conversations, but we were rarely able to make anyone understand our journey. Sharing this article on our personal blog is an effort to share with our friends & family a little bit of how we see our role in the life of our children, what we've been doing for the past three years to maintain an environment conducive to the personal needs of our children at any given time, which, as expected keeps changing frequently. A few friends also shared with us that they would love to travel with their children, and our hope is that this article will help them understand what it might mean to be on the road with growing children. 

We already shared about our first year of travels with Nora on our blog. You can read it here - Backpacking with an Infant for one year.

In our first article we shared how we managed the practical aspects of Nora's needs during the first year of our travels. We shared a bit about the topics of Baby Gear, Soothers, Travel, Food, Health, Vaccinations, Clothes & Footwear, Diapers & Potty training, Bathing, Toys & Entertainment, and Social interactions. We are sharing here a bit more about our journey during the next two years. 

Our role in the life of our children:

We have a spiritual basis to the way we see our role in the life of our children. However, it is not easy to share this here and make it understandable to others. This much we can say about this -- we read various religious and spiritual scriptures of many religions and cultures, and saw an underlying common message of Living & Being in all the scriptures, religious texts, poetry, philosophies, and other things that touch people's hearts and souls. We spent a lot of time understanding this underlying true nature of our being, and this common underlying message is the basis for our understanding of our life, the purpose of our life, and it also defines our role in the life of our children. 

From a practical sense, we are making every effort possible NOT to get lost in the inertia and take on an imaginary role of a "Good Parent", which we think forces the caretakers to push themselves and mould their children into an imaginary and arbitrary idea of success for their children. We want to make every effort possible to not get in the way of the life journey of our children, but still be able to provide an environment that is conducive to their needs at every stage of their lives. 

"The most joyful we have seen our children is when both of us were joyful with our own Being. Our children flourished in that environment" 

We learned in this short period of 3 1/2 years as parents/caretakers of our children, that the best we could do for our children is to live ourselves a life and do things that are true to our own calling. In an environment where both of us were at peace with ourselves, our children simply imitated and learned to do things that brought joy for them. This is the best way that we think we can provide a nourishing environment for our children now and in future. Also, choosing a lifestyle where both of us can be with our children 24x7 made us accessible to them at all times.     

We couldn't have summarized our role as parents better than the poem "On Children" from the book "The Prophet" written by Khalil Gibran, a Lebanese-American poet. Damien Rice, an Irish musician, sang this poem beautifully. If you are interested, here is a video of the song with lyrics:

Physical and practical travel needs:

These were basic needs our children had irrespective of where we lived or where we traveled to. As we moved frequently during our travels, we tried to make sure that these needs were met irrespective of our location. 

Diapers - We continued to use cloth diapers irrespective of the weather conditions and the place we were in. Luckily, in hot weather conditions, the cotton diapers dried easily in the sun or under a fan. In cold weather conditions, there was either a heater or a fan where we could dry the diapers. We feel joy when we look back and see that we haven't used a single commercial diaper so far for both our children which we would have thrown in a trash bin which later would've gone to a landfill. We hope that we can continue this until both our babies are diaper free.

Food - Nora started eating solid foods since she was 4 months old, and Nina also started solids at a similar age. Within a few months after that we started giving them the same foods we were eating, but in a more soft form that was appropriate to their chewing capacity. There was no separate food for our babies after they had a few teeth, except that their food had very little to no salt, no processed sugar, and only mild chilli spice in the food. Our diet at home involves vegetables and fruits that covered most of the vitamins and minerals, and also unprocessed carbohydrates and vegetable proteins, as much as possible. 

Carrier - We continued to use the baby carrier that we had with us since the beginning of our travels. And for Nina we started using an old cotton saaree as a carrier and it worked wonderfully. As Nora started wanting to walk more herself, we used the carrier less often during our travels as the time passed by. When she was tired she was happy to clim up on one of our shoulders and sit there until she was ready to walk again. 

Access to hospitals and medicines - This continues to be a basic need we make sure we have access to wherever we go. With the world interconnected so much and people living almost everywhere around the world, basic medical facilities seem to be available almost everywhere we go, even in remote parts of the world. Even the speciality medical care is never more than an hour or two away from wherever we stayed. 

"Focus on hygiene not on tidiness or cleanliness"

Regarding any kind of medicines, Nora and Nina didn't have to use them so far as they have not fallen ill much. On rare occasions when they had a fever or cold with no accompanying symptoms, it went away on its own in two to three days with adequate rest and a healing environment. We let our children play in the nature around them and not restrict them from playing in soil, nature, or with animals around them. We believe that this has helped their bodies build natural immunity and deal with infections mostly on its own. We are not against medication, but we don't want to use them unless it is absolutely necessary.  

Vaccinations - As we plan on moving from country to country, we had to look at the vaccination topic a bit differently than the way one would traditionally approach it. The vaccination requirements, number of doses, and schedule for the vaccines varies significantly from region to region. Also, there are specific vaccination recommendations for region specific infections like yellow fever, japanese encephalitis etc., Vaccines are there to prevent a wide range of illnesses - some that cause permanent damage/death, some that have the potential of needing long term recovery time after infection, and some illnesses that are simple inconveniences. 

In our conversations with many people with diverse backgrounds and the research we did about this topic, we observed that the opinions are sharply divided into two groups. There is one group who thinks that vaccines are a must, and they want all recommended vaccines to be given to all babies. There is a second group that doesn't want to give any vaccines to their babies. There seem to be very few people, if any, who want to talk about an option that is a middle ground - where you can give vaccinations for illnesses that have high risk of permanent damage/death and go easy on the ones that are simple inconveniences. But we hardly met anyone who is willing to even have a discussion about this middle ground topic. After a lot of research and discussions with others and also between us, we decided a vaccination plan that is in line with our life journey. We think every parent should make a decision that is in the best interest of the health of their family based on their risk bearing capacity, amount of time they can afford to stay away from work, economic impact to their finances, and the health condition of their family members. 

Toys and entertainment - We still don't buy any commercial toys from the market. Nature provides all the toys they need at every stage of their development. And all the stuff at home like kitchen utensils, blankets, boxes, pens, pencils, bottles etc., can also be used as toys. We have not felt the need to buy anything from the market that we don't already have an alternative already available at home that supports the physical, psychological, and emotional need of our kids. We never watch TV unless we are at restaurants where TVs or LCD screens are showing information. Nora has screen time of 1/2 hour every Sunday where she watches photos, videos, and stories for which she prepares a watchlist during the days preceding that Sunday. We have a paper-white Kindle with no backlight that Nora uses to read books or read picture stories that we download for her. She is curious to understand the world around her like the UV rays, how plants grow roots, how clouds become rain, how a car works, how a candle is made.. etc., The weekly video sessions are a way for her to learn about these practical things that she is surrounded by.  

Supporting the formation of healthy Ego/Identities: 

Both of us came to this life changing realization that the egos/identities we take-on at different stages of our lives directly influence the quality of our life, our way of thinking, our ability to be happy. These identities also  influence all the actions we take in every life situations. We have observed during our travels and from our own memories growing up that - from very early on in life identities are given to children by introducing concepts that create identities like - likes, dislikes, good, bad, favourite, best, worst, hate etc. Many children by the time they reach the age of 3-4 can no longer talk or think without these identities. Children at early age become hardwired to think and experience the world only in terms of these arbitrary labels/identities. 

We also realized from our own life journeys that the fewer egos/identities we take-on in life, the more we are at ease with life and living, and the more we have a chance to be happy and have a joyful life. We want our children to start their life with minimal identities, and as they grow older they can take on more identities consciously whenever they feel the need. 

"Being perpetual guests wherever we go, we are blessed with the freedom to give only minimal Egos/Identities to our children" 

As we chose a life to live and travel around different parts of the world, we end up being "Guests" wherever we go. We live in places sometimes for over a year, but for the locals we are always those people who are going to leave. We only book the places we stay for a month or two and keep extending them month-to-month, whenever possible. So the people around us don't feel the need to enforce their way of life on us and our children. This also gives us the freedom to move on to a different country or region when there are any signs of cultural obligations dawning on us. We are blessed with this freedom to be able to constantly move. We are also taking this opportunity to actively minimize identities that restrict the ability of our children to explore and experience their life. 

Minimizing geographical and cultural Identities: Sam was born in India, and moved to the US and became a citizen of that country. Kathi was born in Austria, lived in countries like Switzerland, Kenya, and Serbia. Both Kathi and Sam traveled to over 65 countries so far and have seen first-hand many cultures, tasted foods, and met and befriended people from various walks of life. Nora was born in Austria and Nina in India. Both of them are citizens of Austria, U.S.A and permanent residency holders of India. 

A huge burden of expectations is placed on people based on their geographical identities like their hometown, country of birth, and the region they belong to. Most of the people end up spending rest of their lives living up to the expectations of how they should act, what they should like regarding food/clothing/etc, what they should be proud of, how to defend their region, what aspects of their region they should be proud of etc. Without too much thinking many people take on these identities and constraints, and they spend the rest of their adult lives figuring out why they have difficulty embracing people and cultures of other people and other regions. We experienced these dynamics first hand, when we shared about our experience of Raciscm in Innsbruck (read here) with our friends and family and saw how their ability to empathize and understand our issues was clouded by their identity with their region.  

We feel blessed that the universe has given these diverse geographical identities to both our children where they don't feel the need to belong to one country or one place, and they are free to pick and choose which parts of culture and traditions they want to follow not just from those three countries (Austria, USA, and India) but from anywhere around the world.  

Religious Identities: Our children don't have a religion as we did not register them into any specific religious group. It is for them to decide in future, if religion will help them with their life's purpose, and if so which one. Sam was born in a non-practising Muslim family. Later in his life he studied buddhism for many years. He was certified as a Yoga teacher and studied and incorporated many aspects of Advaita Vendanta and Yoga philosophies into his way of life. Kathi was born in a practicing Christian family and later studied many religious scriptures like Bible, Quran, and also educated herself with other religions and spiritual scriptures. After our diverse religious exposures and learnings, we came to the realization that assigning a single religion to our children from early childhood is a barrier for them from realising their true purpose of life. This is a journey they have to make on their own. Religion is another identity that comes with a lot of baggage and expectations that will most probably burden them like it does to many people. And if they believe that any specific religion will help them on their journey, they will make that decision at the appropriate time in their life. 

Language Identities: Nora doesn't have a single mother-tongue or a primary language. We strongly believe that the concept of mother-tongue originated because fathers were mostly away for work and it was mother's language that children learnt as their first language. As both of us chose to be at home with our kids and raise them together, we decided to speak multiple languages with them. Kathi speaks with Nora and Nina only in German. Sam speaks with Nora and Nina only in Hindi. And Kathi and Sam speak with each other only in English. So Nora, can understand and speak all three languages with ease. Having this flexibility and not identifying with one language as a primary language made it easy for her to speak with both sides of the family. Nora speaks with Kathi's parents in German, and with Sam's parents in Hindi. And with anyone else she meets on the road or at the places we stay, she speaks in English/Hindi/German. 

Minimizing biological identities: Biological identity of whether a person is a male or female has almost divided the world into two groups. There was a time when the roles of men and women were separated based on the muscle strength of men who went out and hunted food or did manual labor to support the family. And women took the roles of bearing children, feeding and nourishing them. Now with the advent of technology, most of these roles are becoming more and more irrelevant. Irrespective of gender of a person or their muscular strength, one can take almost any kind of job, make a living in the same way, run a country or a business, fly an aeroplane, drive a machine, or do anything irrespective of their gender. The only things only women can do in addition to everything men can do, is to be able to bear a child in their womb, and breastfeed them. Beyond this all other differences now became only preferences compared to the past when they were seen as necessities.

Even though the differences are almost non-existent in the current times, we still live in a world where the entire population is divided into men and women for all practical purposes. Cultures enforce how men and women should behave, how to dress, how to have relationships, how to behave and not behave, and the list is never ending. The modern society instead of questioning this age old division and segregation which is no longer necessary, is continuing it by trying to make it into a competition where one group is fighting for the rights and trying to win or defeat the other group. To make it worse, people are proud to create even smaller identities/groups within this men-women division to feel worthy. As long as the market economy is able to capitalize on these divisions and identities, this is not going to go away anytime soon. 

Keeping all of this in mind, we decided to make gender a non-influencing topic in our children's lives. Just like the size of their feet or the color of their eyes should NOT determine any aspect of their existence. At some point they need to use the size of their feet only to buy new shoes, that's it. They might use the color of their eyes to decide whether to wear sunglasses or not to protect their eyes from sun's UV as lighter colored eyes might have more effects due to UV rays. But these things should not determine the type of job they pick, the clothes they wear, and the way they think. If they did, one would think it's ridiculous. But gender is being used to determine all aspects of a person's life (dress, behaviour, job, societal/family roles etc.,) and no one seems to question the necessity of this division. Everyone seems to be happy to keep the division/identities and fight to have equal rights for the two groups. Our children know their gender and will use that information only when necessary and relevant. And we think that necessity would be when deciding whether to have children and whether they want to breastfeed them or not. Other than that, their gender should not influence any aspect of how they live their life or how they make life choices. 

So gender has no influence in anything they do. Even though we come across the question almost every time we meet new people whether our kids are boys or girls. We respectfully tell them we don't think it is relevant to include gender in their interactions with them. It is challenging for many to hear this from us, but we have been doing this for many years and now the responses come to us naturally. We feel it is important to actively and consciously make gender/sex irrelevant in the lives of our children for them to be able to have the freedom to makes choices irrespective of thinking about their body parts. 

Minimizing familial identities: We also have seen this from our personal experience that people are forced into behaving a certain way or picking careers or taking on roles in society based on the family they belong to. Many people are extremely proud of their family names, and they want to maintain a standard for the name and want to continue the customs and traditions of the family (which many can't actually list them precisely if you ask them to create a list with their customs and traditions). Even though this is an amazing way to pass on traditions from previous generations to next generations, it is also restrictive to many as the rules invented by previous generations were relevant to their times but in many cases they are restrictive and suffocating for the younger generations. Younger generation should be able to tap into all the learnings and rich traditions of their ancestors but should not be bound to continue only those things and they should have the freedom to change the ones that are no longer relevant for their times. 

We have experienced this in many countries where people tried to make comparisons of our kids' biological features or their behaviour with one of us. We outright share that they are not like us, and they can never be like us. They are only like themselves and they will always be like themselves. We think it is important to share this information in front of our children so they can feel free to also think about themselves this way. We also tell our children on a regular basis that they don't have to do anything like the way we both do, or think the way we do. They are free to do things in their own way as long as they are able to meet their needs. As long as what they are doing is not a physical danger to their life or to others we try not to interrupt them from their way of figuring out things. Over time we have seen Nora looking up to us a lot less for guidance and trying to figure out things on her own and enjoying the exploration and experimentation. Whenever she has questions or needs clarification about anything, she knows that we are always around and she comes to us. 

Both of us changed our family names after our marriage by creating a new family name which is a combination of both our pre-wedding family names. Even though this was not something we thought through, it came handy as our children carry family names that are limited only to four of us. This took away any pressure that might have come from our relatives if they had carried on with one of our old family names. We feel happy that it worked out this way. 

Also, Nora is aware that there is another baby in our family. We never made the reference to our second baby as a younger child or Nora as an elder sister/sibling. Other than creating a hierarchy and expectations on agreeable behaviour, we don't see any value in enforcing one child to be younger or older. We also make sure that this language is not used by others to make them fall into societal roles of younger/elder sibling or big/small sister. We simply want them to grow up as two members of our family where both of our children form relationships between each-other  and with others that are more in-line with their needs,  personalities and situations they face in life. We think it is very unfair to take-on roles as younger or elder sibling just because someone was born earlier or later, that too out of no effort of their own. Who was born earlier or later should have no bearing to how a person should grow up or live their lives. We do understand that in some families, elder children take on some responsibilities of one of the parents as the other parent is busy with work or away for some reason and the parent at home needs support to take care of other younger children. As we don't have this situation at our home, we make sure that both our children have the freedom just to be children and leave the part of caretaking to us. 

Minimizing restrictions imposed due to age: We heard many people saying this repeatedly to Nora that "When you grow up/are older... you can do this.. you can do that.. or you will be allowed to... " In the minds of young children these statements bring a huge barrier in terms of what they can and can't do. We understand the sentiment behind these statements where they want children not to get hurt by doing things that they are still not capable of doing. So, we rephrased this by saying "After you practice doing this.. you will be able to do it easily..". Whether it is cooking, playing with fire, walking on the street, stitching with a needle, playing with animals, walking in the dark, climbing trees, and many other things people try to restrict children from doing, we've seen Nora carefully practice and be able to do most of these things by herself. We saw that this rephrasing changed the situations from being restrictive to being opportunities to learn and practise things. This also meant that we had to be around Nora most of the day to help her practice and experiment with a lot of things. Over time we saw her invent and show interest in everything we do and try to learn things in her own way. So with Nora and Nina, we try never to say "When you grow up/are older... ", we always focus on saying "After you practice doing this....... ".  

There are also many other cultural norms that tend to get imposed on children because of their age. These become a burden over time. Some cultures expect children to accept everything elders say without ever questioning them. Some cultures expect children to never look directly into teacher/elders eyes, and it's considered rude if they do. Some cultures expect kids to stay away from conversations when elders are talking. There seems to be a separate world for children in many cultures. We are lucky that our children are not bound by these cultural norms and they have the freedom to just explore and understand the world without feeling the need to restrain themselves or be constrained by arbitrary boundaries drawn by others. 

Body aware, not body conscious: We observed during our travels and from our own experiences that it is very common for adults to talk about body parts of children and give them a judgemental value from very early on. Things like - "Wow you have beautiful long hair", "Your teeth look pretty", "You have beautiful brown eyes", "Look at the color of your skin, it is amazing", "Your nails are smooth and .....", "You are a tall .....", "Look how he/she moves his/her eyes when he/she talks", "Look how funny his/her face is when she/he eats food", "You are ............. " and the list never ends. Many adults feel the constant need to reinforce their own preferences and push children to look at their body parts, body language, and behaviours with a feeling of either pride or judgement. Even after becoming adults, most of us can't get rid of these voices in our heads and retain the pride and shame we were forced to develop as children. It is a shame that these arbitrary and unnecessary things are passed on to children from generation to generation without giving much thought to the damage it causes. 

We decided early on that there is no real benefit in talking to our children about any of their body parts as a thing to feel pride or shame about. Our body which changes shape over time and diminishes in old age should be a vehicle of our journey and we should preserve and keep it healthy, rather than be heartbroken by natural degradation or changes to our body. So, we never talked to them about their body parts in a way that makes them feel pride or shame about them. We made sure that they learn about all their body parts and are able to name them so that they are able to communicate about their body in any practical situation necessary and nothing more than that. 

Supporting the psychological needs and development: 

In addition to supporting their physical needs, and helping them form healthy identities, as parents we also play an active role in supporting them in the development of a healthy self image, understanding their purpose of life, their role in the society, forming relationships, respectful communication, learning to trust and empathise with people and situations, negotiating their needs, dealing with conflicting needs and situations, understanding their body and health, and many other things that will continue to shape them into the humans who will have the psychological freedom to understand their emotions and create a joyful life for themselves. It might take forever to go into all the details, but we are sharing a brief insight into a few things:

NO Comparison, Competition, or Criticism: 

Comparison - We both decided early on to never compare our children with anyone else about any topic, EVER. With the support of each other, we make sure that we don't compare our children with other children, adults, or their sibling. Comparison is necessary to compare material objects to be able to understand them for practical purposes like making purchases or building things. But comparing two humans about their body parts, about clothes they wear, about their behaviours, about their abilities, about their emotions, or anything else is simply one of the saddest things a parent can do to their children. We decided to never do that, and we do everything in our power to not allow others to do that to our children either. Nora has no understanding of comparison, and we never heard her compare herself with other children or anyone else about anything so far. We believe that as parents, by avoiding this language at all times makes it easy for our children also to not think in those terms and look at others to live their lives. 

Competition - We discovered that Competition is also one of those things that negatively influences the development of not just children but all humans. Many people believe that competition builds strength and character in children. We see that when children play, study, talk, and in many other areas, it is very common to hear - "Let's see who can finish first...", "Who can run fastest?", "Who is tallest in the group?", "Who has the longest hair... ", "Who scored the highest in the class?" and the list of comparisons never end. In all these comparisons, there is always one winner and every one else is a loser. Most of the games or play situations children are subjected to these days are unfortunately turned into competitive sports. It is a constant race in everything children do and they are encouraged to continue this by associating words like strength, success, and winner to these races. This constant competitive behaviour from early on shows up in every aspect of our current society. Adults are always in this competing mindset to be better than their neighbours, siblings, colleagues and everyone else. Joy of life is associated with being better than others. Competition erodes one's ability to see the worth of themselves as an individual and an already complete human being. Unfortunately people develop a sense of lack and feel the need to be better than others to feel worthy. 

For this reason, we decided to not create situations for our children where there is competition. In situations of play, if all the participants are not having fun and leaving the play at an equal standing, it is not worthy of play time. So we think, in the long run, not having the need to compete in any situation will give our children the freedom to play without competition and do things that make sense to them not in comparison to others. 

Criticism - Criticism is another thing that makes a person feel that what they did was not supposed to be done and they lack something (knowledge, skill, ability etc.,) and they should have known better. Even though this might sound like a simple thing, we believe that the "sense of lack" if developed at an early age will manifest into many forms during a person's teenage years and adult life. This will severely hinder their ability to see themselves as worthy and are always complete human beings without any lack. 

So, we try our best not to criticize our children when things don't go as we expect or when accidents happen. We try our best to make them aware of what happened and if they show interest, we create an environment for them to try it out again and learn from it. Also, criticism comes from our expectations as parents. So we are working hard on ourselves to make sure that we don't impose any expectations on them and just let them grow and BE. 

No "No": This is one of the things that was very difficult for both of us in the beginning. We decided to not use the word "No" with Nora except in situations of danger or something similar. We felt that the word "No" doesn't give her a satisfying clarification of why it was not ok for her to do something or have something. So, instead of saying "No", we tell her the reason behind the "No". It was challenging for us in the beginning to always go into detail without simply saying "No". With each other's help, we both managed to get over the initial challenges, and now after many years of practice it is much simpler for us to be in a constant conversation with Nora about situations and interactions rather than leaning towards creating rules and spending most of the time enforcing those rules.   

Communicating Emotions: This was a big developmental need we have seen in Nora in the past year or so where she started showing emotions and became more visibly sensitive to emotions of others. We felt that the only way we could teach her to communicate her emotions is showing it to her and doing it ourselves as parents. We almost always try to tell her how we feel about any emotional situation. We have seen her learn from it and try to communicate her emotions using the vocabulary she currently has. We feel that this has helped her share her emotions whenever they arise rather than hold them back and explode at some point in the form of a cry or a tantrum. 

Negotiating conflicting needs: We have been trying in every situation possible for Nora to practice negotiation in situations where her needs are in conflict with others needs. This means, as parents, we also had to be open to letting go of our position as long as we were able to meet our needs in other ways. This is an ongoing process where we constantly have situations where we are negotiating with Nora and we, as parents, are also learning about our own needs during these negotiations. 

Understanding, not Fear: We made sure not to use the word "Fear" for the first three years of Nora's life. Even now, we use it rarely to clarify what other people meant when they talk about fear/being scared. We think that fear is a necessary thing to preserve our body from physical danger, but the concept of fear has been extended to imagined situations and it creates mental blockages from doing things. Fear of failure, fear of judgement, fear of losing, fear of rejection etc., are all psychological fears made up in our minds about imagined situations in future. We felt that we need to provide understanding of situations and words life failure, judgement, losing, rejection etc., rather than being scared of them. Also most of these psychological fears come from competition and giving value to other's opinion. We have seen this approach help Nora become curious about many situations where one would normally feel scared and not try it out. Even the situations of physical danger, like walking in the dark, playing with animals and insects, watching snakes from close-by, talking to strangers have become more of a fun thing than things to be scared of. 

Trust: We never lied to Nora. We only tell her the truth. Even when she was a small baby, we never told  the usual lies to make her feel scared of darkness, or tell her to look for an imaginary monkey/animal to distract her to eat food, or playfully try to take hands away from her when she is about to jump. She trusts people, but at the same time we think she is also able to sensitively perceive the intentions behind people's actions and act accordingly. We think that she doesn't need to see the world either as trustworthy or not trustworthy, but simply be sensitive to the individual people, their actions, sensitive to their intentions and live accordingly. 

Understanding Death: Our travels for the past few years took us to many places where Nora saw dead bodies being carried on the streets, and in Rishikesh, India, she has seen on a daily basis bodies being burnt. Also, being in nature she saw insects killing each other and many dead animals. The question arose very early on regarding what happens when someone or something dies. Without dumbing down the concepts of birth and death, we explained to her the concept of birth, growth, degradation, and death of the physical body.  She was able to relate it to the world around her and see that with babies, adults, older people, animals and so on. We think that one of the best things a person can understand at an early age is  the impermanence of our physical existence. This will lead to the other questions of the purpose of our existence and what to do in the limited time we've got on this earth, choose whether to be joyful or miserable in this limited time. 

Forming relationships: As we are constantly moving from place to place, relationships and friendships has a different meaning for Nora. As there are very few identities in her mind, she forms relationships with people in our surroundings and markets, irrespective of their gender, age, and lifestyle. We have seen her freely interact with young children, young adults, adults, elderly, people who might be rich, or street side vendors, or homeless with the same respect and ease. 

Connecting with Nature: Nature is an integral part of our life whether we agree with it or not. The food we eat, the air we breathe, and all our inspiration for our actions comes from nature. We wanted to make sure that we create a nature rich environment for our children whenever possible. We have been blessed that we have stayed in many places in the past three years, and most of them had rich nature around them. We also tried to plant vegetable gardens, and plant new seeds whenever we could. Nora is always happy to join us whenever we did something with soil and water. We hope that this connection with nature will form a strong memory in their body and mind, and they can continue having this connection with nature throughout their lives.

Understanding connection between food and body: We have no food preferences or choices at home. We eat food that is healthy, food that is available in local markets, and food that is suitable for the weather. Processed sugar is not part of our diet and we consume it very rarely. Since we eat everything without a preference, we didn't have to tell our children how to eat healthy. They just eat what is on the table, irrespective of whether it is a bitter gourd, an apple, a raw vegetable, or rice. Not using the language with words - like, hate, dislike, favorite etc. at home, it made things very simple for us and our children to simply eat what is healthy and not create a religion or philosophy out of it. Also, we made sure that Nora understands the relation between carbohydrates, protein, vitamins/minerals and how they help her with energy during the day, build muscles, and help her develop immunity to fight infections. We make sure that we discuss this during our meals so there is a connection and understanding between the food we eat and the functioning of our body. We hope that this basic understanding at this stage will go a long way as they grow up. 

Education: Education is another major topic in any child's life starting from age 3 and above. As we plan on traveling and moving from place to place, it might not be possible for us to have our children go to school and study at one place. As we started looking a bit into how to approach education for our kids. One big question came to our minds - what is the purpose of education?    

There are many methods of education and teaching for children ranging from traditional methods that are focused on recitation and memorization, and modern methods based on interactive techniques. There are also many alternative education methods like Montessori, Steiner/Waldorf, Harkness, Reggio Emilia, Sudbury etc., There are also many methods called student-centric, teacher-centric, play-centric etc., being used around the world to educate children. As we started briefly looking into these methods and approaches, one thing seemed to be common in all these is the purpose of these education styles. 

The methods and approaches were varying in styles, and fluctuating between whether they are focused on teachers or students, but the purpose of why one needs education seems to be similar in all these approaches and methods. That is to make children knowledgeable, financially successful, and contributing members of the economy (with a little focus on society). However, all these methods still seem to only support one's ability to meet their basic needs - food, clothing, and shelter. It is just that there is belief that by following one or the other method from early childhood one can make more money, get a job with higher status in the society, or they can collect more degrees/titles next to their names and feel more worthy. 

We do however believe that the purpose of our life is not to simply collect information, get degrees, make money, buy things, and die. There is a deeper purpose to our life as humans. 

Our primary focus for our children is to understand this purpose and align their education and life with this purpose. Making a living should be a part-time thing to support one's life's purpose and to pursue one's passions. We are sure our children will find a way to make their living, whether it is by opening a street side stall, a business, take a conventional work route, just do nothing, or find innovative ways in future that we can't comprehend at this time as their parents. 

This is our main idea behind how we want to educate our children. We are pretty confident that this idea will mature and take the necessary shape as the years pass by.  

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We don't think consciously all the time about the things we shared above, these things are incorporated into our vocabulary, our thinking and our way of life. We thought of sharing these brief insights into the environment we are providing for Nora and Nina so that some of the queries/questions/curiosities our friends, family members, and others have might be addressed here. 

One thing we can say with joy is that we feel blessed to have this freedom to be able to move from place to place, and to be able to provide an environment for our children that we think is in-line with our values, life learnings, and experiences. 

We are happy to share more details about anything we shared above or about other topics if you are curious.