Thread: *~~thaigirl1-- Kim's lodge~~*

Welcome to your lodge. I am excited to take this journey with you and see your lil one soon.

Oooh, A new lodge! Welcome!

Congrats on making it this far.

Welcome to your lodge!

Congrats! cant wait to read your intro

Welcome and congrats!

Woo hoo Kim!! You have a lodge! I'm so excited for you and so happy to be sharing this journey with you once again

Ah, so exciting. Welcome to your lodge Kim!

Wow, I can't believe you're in the home stretch, Kim! Welcome to your lodge!

Wow, wow, wow!! I have a lodge! I am so honored! You are such a great group of ladies and I am so excited to be sharing this journey with you!


I grew up in central Illinois, in a little town of about 17,000 people. It's one of those places where everybody knows everybody, which was both good and bad as a teenager who didn't want her parents to know everything she did.

Went to Wheaton College, just outside of Chicago and studied math and computer science. Yep, I'm a geek. I met my hubby there too. Even though he was also a computer major, we actually met in a gospel choir. We both volunteered to be 'roadies' to take care of the band equipment, which gave us lots of time together. I graduated in 2003 and he graduated in 2004 (the younger man!). We got married May 15, 2004-six days after he graduated.








A few months after we got married, we moved to St. Louis so he could start a PhD program in computational biology (using computer science for biology research). I was working for FTD, traveling all over the US and Canada to put computer systems in flower shops and train the employees on how to use them. I had a habit of taking the longest route possible to each city to earn frequent flyer miles. For example, to return from Minneapolis, I flew from Minneapolis to Milwaukee to Los Angeles to Detroit to St. Louis. It took 22 hours, but I earned almost 5000 miles.

With all my frequent flyer miles, I took a trip to Asia. DH couldn't come, but I visited a college friend in Japan, some friends from church in Thailand, and some other friends in China. It was amazing! While in Thailand, I heard about some of the needs they had at the school, and to make a long story short DH & I decided to drop out of grad school and move to Thailand.

So in August 2005 we moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand. We worked at a school for missionary kids, where I taught high school computer science and Jeremy did technical support. It was an amazing experience!! I learned to drive stick on the opposite side of the road, we rode elephants, we tried fried bugs, and we had the most amazing Thai food. Here are a couple pics from that:






While we were in Thailand, we found out we were expecting!! We were SO excited! It was a really tough decision whether to stay in Thailand or not, but we ultimately decided to come back to Illinois during the summer and not stay for another school year. We came back to my hometown in June 2006, and in September Ian was born.



Originally, we were planning on heading back to Chicago right after he was born so DH could find a job. But a lot of circumstances changed, and DH actually got a fantastic job working from home for a company in Cleveland doing audio-visual programming work. So we decided to stay in Jacksonville, the same town as my parents live in. They were thrilled of course to have their only grandson nearby. We ended up buying our first house here last spring.

Last fall, we got some very sad news. My dad found out he had leukemia. The very next morning, we got our BFP. Talk about a roller coaster of emotions. We waited until Thanksgiving to tell anyone about the pregnancy because we wanted to see how things looked for my dad. He was home after his first round of chemo then, and he was optimistic about the treatments. They were so excited to be grandparents again. My dad especially-he fought another cancer 10 years ago and said that living to see his grandkids was one of his biggest motivations.

Unfortunately, my dad lost his battle on April 28th after a failed bone marrow transplant. I knew his chances weren't good, but I had really been hoping he'd make it long enough to see this baby born. Here are a few of my favorite pictures of my dad:




The last month has been kind of crazy for us, trying to help my mom sort everything out. My dad was a practicing surgeon until he got sick last fall, so we had to close down a medical practice in addition to all the normal insurance, medical bills, etc. We'd been so focused on Dad that this baby has kind of snuck up on us. About two weeks ago, DH & looked at each other and realized that we only had 6 weeks until the baby was due, and we had done pretty much nothing!! We've started getting things together now, although there's still a lot to do!