Okay, here goes...

After graduating high school in '88, I escaped the whole high school mentality and experience by heading out to a fantastic private college in West Virginia where I knew NO ONE else from my high school would be going. (God it was beautiful out there... I digress.)  I truly loved it there, loved my classes, loved my professors, loved my friends.

Idiot me finds a boyfriend who happens to live close enough to my home that we decide that at the end of the year, we'll quit this college and go to a college closer to home, together. The 300-mile treks home were getting to be a bit much. And who knows, maybe we'll move in together.
Well, his mother flipped when he told her he filed his "I'm not coming back" papers, and he's a real mama's boy, so I never hear from him again.

My parents are also pretty pissed at me, but now I'm feeling guilty for them paying that huge tuition and me "blowing it" by quitting, so I live at home and go to a community college. Fun times, getting to hang out with old friends, and eventually I get hooked up with one of my most annoying classmates, Guy Reynolds.

We get married in June of 1990 and it was one fiery roller-coaster ride. We were just too much alike, his parents thought I was the anti-christ, there were some physical abuse and cheating issues, etc etc.

My parents moved to Syracuse, New York after Clinton got elected and the DoD market started getting scared, consolidating companies and closing bases (my dad works in the defense industry). Guy and I followed them up there. In the spring of 1995, after many dramatic versions of Hell on earth, we split up for good.

September 16, 1995, I went to a friend's party and met this smart, charming, confident, hot as hell long-haired guy named Mike. Three years later, on Sept. 16, 1998, we were married by a Wiccan high priestess in our t-shirts and jeans - the way we wanted it. :)

I was still friends with Guy (had even been the best man in heels and tux at his wedding to his 2nd wife) and our whole gang of friends, being techno-geeks, decided to move down to Florida since the I.T. market down there was so good.  So in the spring of '99, we packed up our things and our first son, Kelsey, and headed to Fort Lauderdale.
(I hated it there. There were no seasons. Just heat, all the time. No changing leaves, no crisp fall air, no snow... being born and raised in Maryland it *really* fucked with my body's internal clock.)

Still suffering from Clinton's maniacal reduction of the military, cutting funding for defense programs, and the market's reaction to all of this, my parents were basically forced to leave Syracuse and move to southeastern Virginia in the fall of '99.

In January of 2000 the company that we worked for decided to send Mike out to Illinois and Ohio to help start up new branches for the company. They promised he'd only be gone a month... which was important, because I was very pregnant with a due date of late March/early April. Well, come March he still wasn't back home, I still hated Florida's weather, and I figured if he wasn't going to be there, I may as well go home.  So at 36 weeks pregnant, I packed up our condo and drove up to Virginia to move in with my parents. Mike would drive from Ohio on the weekends to see me and Kelsey. One weekend in April his boss told him he couldn't come see us, and said "you can go after the baby is born"... and Mike told him to shove his job up his ass.

I was literally 44 weeks pregnant when Brendon was born on May 2nd, 2000.

We've been here in Virginia ever since.  Our third son, Alex, was born July 19th, 2004 at home in our bathtub.  Mike caught him, Kelsey watched... Brendon refused to get out of bed to see the birth. No, there was no midwife. Yes, we planned it that way. :)

I homeschool the boys, Mike is also working in the defense industry (matter of fact he works with Mom and Dad), basically all we're missing is the dog and we'd be your typical "american dream" kind of family. We did choose to send the boys to public school this year because Kelsey was really itching to give it a try and I was just getting no help here at home from Mike... but after just a month of public school, Kelsey came back home disgusted and disillusioned.  The shine has also worn off for Brendon, and although his teacher makes attempts to give him work at his level, there's just no cure for an insanely bored 6yr old who reads on a 4th-grade level listening to his classmates go "M says mmmmmmmmmm".  We've talked about it, and we'll probably be pulling him back out of school after the first semester is over (basically he won't go back after christmas break). 

So that's about it.  We're your untypical homebirthing, homeschooling, non-christian nuclear family.  We're not rich, but we've got a nice 4-bedroom house with a huge yard and the world's smallest kitchen, a huge minivan and two cars. We've also got the cat that decided (as a kitten) I was his human way back in 1991, and he loves to remind Mike that he was here first, LOL. Kelsey and Brendon are in Cub Scouts, Mike and I are both Cub Scout leaders. Our house looks like a tornado hit it ALL of the time - yes, I live with typical male slobs and I'm the only one who ever does anything about the mess. (Note: this doesn't jive very well with being a homeschooling Mom of 3 young boys who actually needs to SLEEP once in a while.)  Don't ever plan on popping in unannounced, because you will NOT be invited in. You can enjoy the sights of Norfolk and VA Beach for 24 hours while I get this hellhole cleaned up. Yes, I really am dead serious. :)

That's my life since high school in a nutshell. I know, it sounds boring, but believe me... we had some high drama and some great wild times mixed in there. The devil's in the details. :)