We know what it feels like to raise a baby thousands of kilometres from everyone who’s done it before.
Two jobs, one toddler, no grandparents down the road. Every decision came with ten opinions from back home and zero help next door. So we started writing down what actually worked.
Hi, we’re Aruna and Anand.
We met in 2010 and, if we’re being truthful, fell for each other before the first conversation was over. Sixteen years later, we still say it’s the easiest decision either of us ever made.
Everything after that was the hard part.
We started with almost nothing. No jobs, no savings, no safety net, just two people who refused to let go of each other. We took whatever work came, small jobs, odd hours, some months counting coins on the kitchen table, and we kept each other standing. We didn’t rise; we crawled, then walked, then one day found ourselves boarding a flight abroad with a suitcase each and a plan that was mostly hope.
In 2022, after twelve years of building a life first, we finally got married.
Then came our son.
Nobody warns you what it’s like to have a baby thousands of kilometres from both your mothers. No one at the door with hot food. No grandparent to hold him at 3 a.m. Just the two of us, a tiny human, and a phone full of advice that never quite fit our life. We got a lot wrong. We cried in hospital corridors and airport queues. We learned to swaddle from a video and to travel with a toddler by simply doing it badly first.
And somewhere in there, we noticed that the hardest years had made us better at everything: as partners, as parents, as a team.
That’s what this page is. Not experts. Not perfect. Just a family that’s a few steps ahead of you on the same road, sharing what we’d hand to a friend who just landed in a new country with a baby and no idea where to start.
He’s still teaching us. We’re still learning. Come along.
So you don’t have to figure it out alone.
When our little explorer arrived, the advice arrived with him. From two mothers, four aunts, three WhatsApp groups and every reel the algorithm decided we needed. All of it different. None of it written for two people doing this in a new country, alone.
In the gaps between feeds and flights, we started keeping notes: what we tried, what worked, what we’d skip next time. Those notes became the “They said…” series, then the guides. One place, organised by stage, written for Indian families without the village.
We try everything before we share it.
Nothing in our guides is theory. Every checklist has been through a real airport, every routine through a real jet-lagged week, every “they said” through our own home first. We keep what works, name what doesn’t, and tell you which is which.
Where it matters — sleep, feeding, medicines, documents — we cross-check against WHO and IAP guidance and our own pediatrician. It isn’t medical advice; it’s the homework, done and organised, so you don’t dig through a hundred tabs at 2am.
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