Welcome! I’m Meghan. Wife to Ande and Mom to Henry, Milo, and Luca. For our day jobs, I’m an attorney and my husband is a restaurateur. I’m type-A, usually very organized (just don’t look in my Monica-closet storage room), and detail-oriented (bordering on perfectionism). We live in a suburb of St. Louis, the same city we both grew up in. It’s familiar, comfortable, and a great place to be raising our boys surrounded by our families.
That being said, we love to travel! And we do it as much as we can, both with and without our kids.
Seeing, trying, and experiencing new things is invaluable in my opinion. Travel fosters a natural curiosity as it causes you to ask questions, want to learn, and appreciate others. And we want our boys who are 7 and 4 (almost 5), and (almost) 4 months to be curious and aware and grateful for their opportunities. At these young ages, Henry and Milo have each traveled to 3 countries outside the U.S. Hopefully, we’ll catch Luca up in no time! Not including our home state, our boys have each been to 16, 14, and 3 states, respectively. I didn’t travel outside of the United States until I was in high school! So I am grateful they’ve experienced so many new places, and we’re looking forward to adding to our travel lists!
Along the way, there have been many points in my life where friends have said you should totally do “X” as a side gig. At first, it was interior decorating. The first blogs I read were all interiors-focused – Young House Love and Elements of Style were among my go-to’s and remain blogs I still read to this day. At the time, I was decorating my first apartment and then redecorating my now husband’s home which became the first home we lived in together. Now I’m decorating (and in some cases redecorating) the first home we bought together in 2014.
Organization is another love. The Container Store is always calling my name. This came in handy when I helped my sisters move into their dorm rooms, when Ande and I had a double move in 2014, and then when we dealt with the massive influx of stuff that comes along with having babies! Registry Expert is another job my family and friends have said I should have made a side gig. When I got married and then had my first baby I found ALL the deals. Seriously, I figured out and worked all the deals like a Coupon Lady. So much so that I was able to get all 12 of my white wine Waterford crystal glasses for basically free!
I still love all these things and aspects of these interests have impacted the way we travel. I want the places we visit to be pretty and inspiring. Traveling requires organization and planning (to some extent, more on that later), and being a registry “expert” was the result of A LOT of research, which you need to do for traveling.
But after returning from our summer adventure in 2021—a 2-week road trip through California—a lot of friends said I should plan trips. Since I was asked by several friends to share our itinerary, I kept coming back to the idea that it’d be easier to share if I had it all in one place that everyone could see and I could add other itineraries from past adventures or as we finished another one. So that’s going to be the primary focus here—travel, both with and without kids. I may have to throw in some other topics, just to keep it interesting while we’re holding down our day jobs and our kids are attending school. But I hope you’ll follow along and get inspired!