About Me

As I'm typing this, I'm 32 years old, which trust me, sounds just as crazy to me as it does to you. I not only have a CHAIR at the grown-up table, but I bought that table, set it myself with my own china, made the lasagna on it and poured more than a few cocktails in the process. The fact that I feel old is pretty pointless considering that I got married when I was only twenty-one and felt like I was thirty for almost a decade before I actually was. My husband is still my best friend and even though it often causes him to contort himself physically with discomfort, he continues to encourage me to write, sometimes even sending my blog address to his colleagues and clients (speaking of which, HELLO THERE important people who pay our bills! The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of The Man).

I started a private online diary in 2002 when I was miserably unhappy and couldn’t afford Prozac. At the time I had no health insurance, no job and we’d been trying to get pregnant unsuccessfully for over two years. To top it all off, I weighed over 300 pounds. So I blogged my way down from that cliff – through my gastric bypass surgery and subsequent 135 pound weight loss, through getting accidentally pregnant only four months after my surgery while we were still living with Dave’s mom to save money for a house, through that amazing pregnancy and horrendous birth and through the purchase, renovation and sale of our (ridiculously expensive good riddance) condo in San Jose.

I was a professional financial advisor for seven years before quitting my job to stay home with my son Alex. As wonderful and accommodating as my career was, it turned out that the number of times I was physically capable of getting into my car and driving away from my baby was finite. I only lasted 18 months. Even my milk supply lasted longer. I still miss my job and how it made me feel important and smart, but that paled in comparison to how much I missed the way my boy smelled like ripe nectarines (although now that he's getting older, it's less eau de fruite and more eau de stinky cheese).

In May of 2006, I gave birth to a bouncy baby girl named Genoa. She was horribly colicky and allergic to dairy (which since I'm a BreastFeeder (with a capital B), meant Mommy had to go five months without cheese) and just this week, 810 days into her life, she FINALLY slept through the night for the FIRST TIME. So to answer your burning question? NO, we're not having any more children. Mama's shop is officially closed for business.

In June of 2007, we finally put into action our many-year-long plan of leaving all our friends and family and moving out of state. We've been here in Vancouver, Washington for more than a year now and still feel like it was the best decision we've ever made. We love everything about life in the Pacific Northwest including the rain, but mostly it's the people we love. Moving here made me realize that that I've probably spent most of my life as a raging jerk, because why else would everyone here seem SO EXTREMELY UNNECESSARILY NICE? The easiest explanation is that living in California gave me a bit of a brittle shell and a tendency to become a lunatic behind the wheel of a car. Washington has set me straight and I look forward to raising my family and growing old in the shadow of Mt. Hood.

I am surprisingly comfortable in my own skin, annoyingly cheerful and relentlessly chatty. I love sauteeing onions in butter, using 10% of coupons at Target, smelling my children's feet, taking 27 photographs of exactly the same thing, crossing over the WA/OR border to buy pork products, inviting people over, seeing stacks of sweaters in rainbow colors and catching my car's reflection in the back of an oil truck. I have an almost scandalous obsession with cheeseburgers and I never, EVER wear sweat pants in public.