Mr. Carrot and I are both first generation immigrants and avid travelers (pre baby, anyway). So one of the most important things to us in raising Baby Carrot is to expose her to different cultures and international experiences, and hopefully raise a similarly curious explorer and excited traveler. With that in mind, we designed Baby C’s nursery and library with a travel theme in mind, and have begun some planning for future adventures along this theme.

Nursery

As soon as we found out we were expecting, I knew immediately that I wanted the nursery to be travel themed. I didn’t want a particularly girly nursery, but I liked the idea of making it feminine, and found some great items to that end:

1) Watercolor canvas map by Michael Thompsett

This was actually a Zulily find through one of their sales, though the artist has his work available through the site in the link above. He does a huge variety of watercolors and prints that are map themed, so it was truly hard to decide on our favorite. In the end, we settled on this world map print, which has just the right amount of color and a bit of girly-ness to it, I think. It’s the centerpiece of Baby C’s nursery and flows perfectly with other artwork in the room.

ADVERTISEMENT

2) Travel prints by Loxly Hollow (the left and right, in the picture below) and Sadly Harmless (middle)

A few bloggers mentioned Loxly Hollow before – I may have even found it through Hellobee! – and the penguin print from Sally Harless was an Apartment Therapy article find. Both Etsy shops have absolutely magical prints, many on travel and outdoor themes. It was hard to choose just a few, and I have a feeling I’ll be heading back their way when we get ready for Baby C’s big girl room.

3) Growth chart and Dr. Seuss clock


Trend Lab makes a lot of Dr. Seuss nursery items, and the Oh! the Places You Will Go clock was perfect for our theme. The growth chart was actually made by my incredibly talented coworker for my office baby shower – it includes clouds with various places that have meaning to Mr. Carrot and me (from our travels and personal and professional lives), scaled to 1 inch = 100 miles. There was also a lovely airplane tacked on to that empty tape spot that Baby Carrot pulled off at the first opportunity, but I’m hoping to replace it shortly with something she hopefully can’t pull off easy. Once she gets a little older, we’ll be able to tell her that she’s tall enough to reach Las Vegas, where her dad and I got engaged, my hometown in Russia or our favorite spot in Egypt.

Library

In addition to the nursery decor, we also included as many internationally themed books as we could into Baby C’s library. My friends gave us a huge collection of travel books for kids, as well as DVDs and books in Russian that I read as a kid, so we look forward to breaking those out when Baby C is a bit older and out of the destroy-all-the-paper phase. These days, we read a lot of books from Disney’s It’s a Small World book collection and some of the Indestructibles books that take traditional nursery rhymes and set them in various countries, like Old McDonald Had a Farm…in Bolivia! – both sets are great sensory books, harder to destroy, and allow us to talk to Baby C about different cultures she’s experiencing through them.

And beyond!

A lot of the exposure to international themes we hope to give Baby C are going to be more sensible as she gets a bit older. Living in the Washington D.C. area, we have access to a huge array of possibilities to pick from, including:

International schooling: As she gets closer to 2, we’re looking into transferring Baby C out of her home daycare and into a more structured learning environment. One of our top choices for her is a school that caters to children of diplomats that are working in DC through the State Department, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Most kids in the program are at least bilingual, and the school places a lot of emphasis on cultural experiences, which we’d love for Baby C to have.

Museums and other activities: Washington DC is home to some of the biggest museums in the world, so we have endless possibilities when it comes to exposing Baby C to both domestic and international history, art and culture. Additionally, every spring, Cultural Tourism DC hosts Passport DC, which allows kids and adults to visit foreign embassies to explore their cultures, and a wide array of performance venues like The Kennedy Center, host international performers, international festivals and beyond.

Travel and language learning: As Baby C gets older, one of the biggest things we hope to do is start traveling with her. Mr. Carrot and I still have a long list of places we’d like to visit ourselves, and when Baby C is old enough to begin partaking in those experiences, we intend to travel with her as much as possible. We also hope to enroll her in some language programs since unfortunately Mr. Carrot and I don’t share our respective second languages and thus can’t really pass them on easily to Baby C.

Reading back this post, it occurred to me that this sounds a bit like an overachiever parent setting up a life path for her kid, which is ironic since, despite growing up in cultures that are very much focused on kids accomplishing a lot in very specific areas, Mr. Carrot and I are completely opposed to dictating Baby C’s life path. We hope that these small attempts on our part will foster her curiosity for things outside her own bubble, whatever those may be. If she decides that she’d much rather stay home instead of traversing the globe and focus on other pursuits, that’d be just fine with us, as long as she’s eager to learn and explore.