100 Days of You

Dear Olivia,

It has been 100 days now since you've become a part of our family and already I can't remember what life was like without you!  You have daddy's personality for sure because mornings are your happy time.  When I go in to wake you up each day, I am greeted by the biggest smile.  You are so happy to see me, which just warms my heart, especially since my time with you during the days is so much more limited now that I have gone back to work.  I know that you are in good hands with Grammy and Grampy, who come to the house bright and early to spend their day with you.  They always have such a good report about  your day when I get home including detailed descriptions of the new skills you are learning and what you are discovering. 

This past Sunday was a special day for our family because we dedicated you at church.  We promised to bring you up to know the Lord and have a personal relationship with Him.  This was also your first time at church and you did so good!  When we were up on stage, you just looked out at the audience, not afraid of the big crowd, or the bright lights and loud noises.  When we were done on stage, you fell asleep in my arms for the rest of the service.  That is just you - content.

You continue to have a healthy appetite, putting you at 14.2 pounds and in the 82% for your weight.  3-6 month clothes are quickly growing shorter and shorter by the day as you get taller and taller.  You are already 25 inches and in the 91% for your length.  We even had to move up to size 3 diapers and night and soon size 3's during the day.

Sweet baby girl - you are loved beyond anything you could ever imagine!

One Day in Tokyo - Where Would You Go?

On my upcoming trip to Asia, Tokyo is one of the cities that I am most looking forward to visiting again.  My first trip to Japan was back in 2007 and was 14 days long.  We stayed in the famous Imperial Hotel, just south of the Imperial Palace, and saw pretty much all of the highlights of Japan.  We were entertained by the song and dance of geisha's, transcribed the sutra with monks at the Moss Temple, climbed Himejo Castle and were humbled by the remains at Hiroshima.  It was truly a spectacular trip!  Even the famous cherry blossoms were in bloom during our visit.  Brilliant shades of pink were visible out the windows as we road the bullet train through Japan at speeds of almost 200 mph.

My first (and honest) impression of Japan was that while it was incredibly, beautiful, clean and safe, it was the closest I will probably ever get to being dropped off on the moon!  I remember having some free time on that first trip and contemplated leaving the hotel on my own to explore some of Tokyo and to experience some of the local cuisine.  I've done a lot of traveling in my days and am usually pretty fearless about exploring new international cities.  I made it down the elevator, out of the hotel and about 50 feet away from the hotel and chickened out and ended up ordering room service instead. 

I did much better on my second trip to Tokyo, managing to get myself from the airport on to the correct train to Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world.  From the station, I navigated my way to the hotel and even was brave enough to venture out to dinner...all by myself! 

I'll only have a day (at most) for sightseeing this time around and want to be sure to make it to a few spots I haven't visited on my previous trips like the Tokyo Tower, the Imperial Palace East Gardens and the famous Tsukiji fish markets (if I can wake up early enough).  I'd also like to find some unusual baby toys or clothes to take back to Olivia. 

 Where do you like to go when you visit Tokyo?  Who has the best ramen or sushi in Shinjuku?  What should I be sure to visit on my one day in the city?

Balancing Work and Family

One of my most favorite parts of my job has been the extensive amounts of international travel that I have done over the past seven years.  I've traveled the globe and been to some pretty amazing places, including my favorite destination, Aitutaki, in the Cook Islands in the remote South Pacific.  This is where I learned to snorkel for the very first time.

On this particular adventure, I happened to be in the company of Spencer Wells, who was visiting remote areas of the South Pacific to sample genetic materials from the indigenous populations.  This genetic material would later be used in his project to document human migration, ultimately proving the existence of Adam and Eve.  The Atolls and Motus (think tiny islands) were some of the most gorgeous scenery that I have ever seen, anywhere in the world! 

On this adventure of a lifetime, we even stumbled upon the filming of Survivor: Cook Islands that premiered back in September of 2006.  We couldn't see any of the filming while it was happening but did spend the afternoon on Exile Island where we picnicked and snorkeled for the afternoon, without the cast of course! 

My traveling days have been put on hold for the past several months, once I was too far along in my pregnancy to safely fly.  This time last year, I was preparing for a major trip to Asia that would take me to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo. 

Unfortunately, our trip was cut short in Shanghai when the devastating tsunami hit Japan last March.  I was secretly 2 months pregnant at the time and we hadn't told anyone except our parents the good news, planning the big reveal for after this trip was over.  The earthquake aftershocks in Tokyo, electricity shortage and increased levels of radiation made it a no-brainer of a decision to return to the US as quickly as possible.  We headed home through South Korea instead of Japan and made it back to Atlanta a grueling 24 hours later. 

A return trip to Asia is on the horizon for me in the next several weeks and my usual excitement for travel is now mixed with emotion when I think about leaving behind my precious baby girl for 10 days as I travel half way around the world.  On one hand, I am excited to go back to some of my most favorite countries, but on the other hand, I feel guilty about going and worry that I will miss my sweet baby.  Any tips on how to make it any easier for this first time momma?  How do you balance work and family?

Happy 3 Month Birthday!

3 Months Old

Happy 3 month birthday, Olivia! You continue to be such a sweet and happy baby and your gummy smiles just melt our hearts. You weight 13.2 pounds and are wearing 3-6 months clothes now and size 2 diapers. At your last checkup, you were in the 99% for your height. The pediatrician said that with your height, blue eyes and blondish hair, we were surely in for trouble!

You are sleeping through the night from 8 PM until 7 AM with take several good naps each day. Up until this weekend, we swaddled you for every nap and at night time, which you loved. You've gotten SO strong lately that you've been breaking out of the super tight Mom's on Call swaddle and then the Velcro swaddle blanket that we moved you in to so that we could keep swaddling you for a bit longer. On Friday night, you slept ALL night with no swaddle and no tears. You did so good that we even unswaddled you during naps and you still sleep like a champ.

You continue to have a great appetite and have 5 bottles each day, ranging from 5-7 ounces each. It is hard to believe that next month you will be starting cereal and then baby food. You are growing up SO fast!

Just this week you started reaching out for our faces and love batting at the toys that dangle on your activity mat. So far, your right hand seems to be the dominant one. You light up when we put you on your Rain forest mat and love to watch the lights and sounds.

You are constantly smiling and "talking". You love to tell Papa about your day when he gets home from work - the changing table is where you spill your secrets! Tummy time is getting easier for you every day but still isn't your favorite. Putting you on the exercise ball for tummy time has seemed to make it a bit more bearable for you. We can't wait to see the changes that this month brings!  Here is look back on the past 3 months.

Just Born

One Month Old

Two Months Old

Happy 2012 and a Resolution

My New Year's resolution for 2012 is very simple, to remember this magical year as first time parents and to enjoy every moment to its fullest. We've been so blessed this year with a new addition to our family, baby Olivia. She arrived in mid-October and has been a complete joy since her arrival. Even the hard days are a blessing.

Between the lack of sleep and my notoriously bad memory, I find myself looking back on the past three months since her arrival and saying "when was it that she first slept through the night" or "do you remember when she gave up her night time feeding"? She is growing and changing each day and I want to remember every gummy grin, smile, coo and milestone along the way. I know that one day too soon, she'll be headed off to kindergarten and then before we know it, college and I will want to look back on the precious memories of our journey along the way. My resolution for 2012 is to document our first year as new parents to baby Olivia and all of our adventures along the way.

One Year Ago...

It is hard to believe how fast the past year has gone! Over the past 12 months, I've been doing quite a bit of traveling, both for work and for fun. These adventures have taken me to Europe, Tokyo, South Korea, Hong Kong (twice), China (twice) and Singapore (twice). In just a few weeks, I'm headed out again, this time to Scotland and London. More on that upcoming trip later...

Needless to say, my love of travel and visiting new places has taken me to some pretty exciting adventures, including a year spent working in Lugano, Switzerland. You can read my old blog posts from that year here.

With a baby on the way, frequent overseas travel is about to be put on the back burner for awhile. I do hope our little girl grows up to love traveling as much as I do. I can't wait to show her the world.

Here is a look back on where we were one year ago.


Our journey started out here, in Lugano, Switzerland. I couldn't wait to show my sweetie, CH, the beautiful town that I used to call home.


No visit to Lugano is complete without a boat ride and lunch at one of the grottos on the lake.

After a mandatory visit to the chocolate factory and dinner with friends, we headed out on the train for Zermatt. Several hours later, this was our view...



No visit to Zermatt is complete without a trip up to the Matterhorn! Even though it was June, we had snow showers up at the top of the mountain. It was pretty foggy, so we weren't able to get a clear picture of the Matterhorn but took tons of pictures up at the top anyway.



These are just a few of the photos from our European journey. Our trip lasted two weeks and took us all the way through Switzerland, France, Germany and then concluded in Amsterdam. Fabulous memories and an amazing trip!

Sweet Home Alabama

Ok, so the title isn't exactly right but that was a close as I could come to a song about the South! You get the idea...

Hello from Switzerland! It has been awhile since my last blog posting and I had some new pictures to share with you along with my recent travel adventures!

Keeping this up to date and replying to a bazillion emails has taken a lot more time that I had originally though...my apologies if you haven't heard from me in awhile.

The big news on this side of the ocean is that I have decided to come back to Atlanta for good starting in late June/early July. Living abroad has been quite an experience but I am ready to put away my suitcase for awhile and resettle in Atlanta. Being away for the past several months has made me realize just much I miss all of you and that Atlanta is where I want to be.

I have to give other expats out there credit...living abroad isn't easy. I've been here for seven months now and I still can only speak VERY basic Italian and have to rely on others to help me do the basics things in life like making a doctors or even a hair cut appointment. It is almost like learning to do everything all over again. I don't regret my decision to live abroad because if I hadn't at least tried it, I think I would have always wondered what it it would have been like if I did. Now I know...

Knowing now that I am definitely coming back, I am trying to travel as much as possible and see everything that I can. I recently went to Venice for Carnival and was amazed by how beautiful the essentially floating city was. The city was alive with people dressed up like the pictures that I posted...honestly, they were a bit errie! It is a great city for wandering and exploring...you never know what you will find around the next corner!

Other trips include a Paris weekend with my work friend Christina (also from the ATL...we make southern food togeter and talk about the South when we are homesick). I am taking a shortened recruiting trip to Switzerland next week and will be back in Rome the following week for more school visits. This will probably be my last trip down to Rome, so I am making plans to definitely see the Sistine Chapel on this trip! I will be stopping in Florence, Siena, Pisa and Assisi on the way back to experience some of the Italian countryside.

The rest of the spring is busy with visits from friends and family and other work activities. I will be traveling back to the States for some recruiting on the east coast in late April and early May and then hopefully travling around Europe with my family in mid-May. More adventures and pictures to come!

View from Venice Belltower 

Venice Grand Canal 

Traditional Costume for Carnival in Venice 

In Front of Notre Dame 

Paris Flower Market 

View from Lugano 

Looking Downtown 

Lugano Mountains 

Main Piazza in Lugano 

View from Downtown 

VIew of Lake Lugano 

Looking for Heidi...

Bonjour from Lausanne, Switzerland! It is my second day on the road for this trip and I have traveled from one side of Switzerland to the other, switching languages three times. This tiny country has three official languages…(actually four but very few people actually speak that one). I left Lugano hearing Italian, took the train west to the French speaking part of the country and am on a train back to Zurich where the speak Swiss German.

I spent the better part of the day on the train yesterday, making my way across the country to visit some tiny schools up in the Alps. The area that I was traveling to is called the Alpes Vandoises, and is home to a few isolated skiing villages and the two Swiss boarding schools that I was going to visit. The town of Villars, way up at the top of the mountain is accessible by a post bus and also a quaint little Edwardian train. The views from both were amazing as we wound our way both up and down the mountain. I arrived to find a sleepy little town, finishing the last of its hibernation as it prepared for the start of ski season in the next few weeks. The weather had changed dramatically from what I had left behind in Lugano and I was thankful that I had remembered to bring along my winter coat. The counselor at the school that I was going to visit said that it had snowed the day before and that the town would be encased in snow in a few weeks time when the slopes would be open for ski season. Had I been there as a tourist, I could have gotten on one of several gondola’s and skied down the nearby glacier. The counselor said that he skis about 80 days out of the year and often gets in several runs during lunchtime! Short of skiing, there really isn’t much to do in the town…I left for civilization after my presentation because there didn’t even seem to be any place open in the town to get dinner.

I returned about an hour later to the modern town of Lausanne and to my hotel for the night…I am always amazed at just how tiring sitting on a train all day can be! I am on my way back to Zurich for two more visits tomorrow before heading back to Lugano tomorrow evening. The stores stay open late tonight…9 PM instead of the usual 6:30 so I am hoping to do some shopping! I have two days at home before heading out again for my last and longest trip of the recruiting season. I will spend a week in Eastern Europe and then will return to Switzerland to finish out the rest of the Swiss boarding schools. I’m signing off from Zurich and off to find some good Swiss fondue!

Technically Speaking...

I am happy to report that things are starting to look up for a change, at least technologically speaking. You would think that life in Europe is pretty similar to life back in the States, wouldn’t you? After all, Switzerland is a pretty advanced country with a firm grasp at least on the watch and chocolate industry! One of the biggest adjustments for me so far has been getting used to how long it takes to do very simple things around here. For example, I have been here for almost three months now and am just now (hopefully) getting a regular phone connection in my apartment. Internet access should soon follow, but I’ve been through this drill before which has ultimately led to disappointment. I have come to learn that the Swiss phone system has recently been deregulated so that are still a lot of hoops to jump through to even get a phone line, let alone choose a competitor who might have better prices. And, just because you choose a competitor, they might not be able to even install service, which is what happened to me…only they forgot to tell me for over a month that the wouldn’t be able to connect my service…ever. Nice.

I seem to have had a string of technology disasters recently that started with the phone/internet connection, or lack there of and have steadily progressed. I returned from my recruiting trip to Rome to find no electricity or heat in my apartment. The smell from the refrigerator was a clue that the power had been off for some time (I had been gone for 5 days). Getting ready for work the next morning by candlelight, I wondered if I had mistakenly been transported back to the days of Little House on the Prairie. I had tried flipping the circuit breakers to see if a fuse had blown which I thought at first was a strong possibility since my parents were visiting and had brought along what was supposed to be a dual voltage hair dryer (it wasn’t). When that didn’t work, I knew that a call to the dreaded landlady was in order…did I mention that she is at least 85 years old and is truly from Transylvania…I thought only bats and Dracula where from Transylvania! She only speaks Italian and French and looks as though she escaped from some cave on a hillside with only the mismatched clothes on her back…seriously. She owns at least half of the apartment buildings in Lugano but knows how to pinch a penny (or a Swiss Franc, to be more accurate) until it bleeds. I am unable to communicate with her because my Italian is still pretty basic (hello, goodbye, how are you) and I certainly didn’t know how to say that I had no electricity! Luckily, one of my coworkers is Italian and offered to make the call for me.

As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, I returned home from work that next day (still no heat or electricity…did mention that the weather had turned cold and that it had stared snowing a ways up the mountain?) to find out that the washing machine was broken. This was about the absolute breaking point for me considering that there is one tiny washer for the entire apartment complex to share and no dryer. For some strange reason, the Swiss don’t believe in using clothes dryers so everything has to be hung to dry. I had been traveling for work for the past week and had about two weeks of laundry to do before hitting the road for work again and a broken washer didn’t fit into my plan. So, I did what all good American expats do when they are stressed out and frustrated and they have no groceries…I headed to Mc Donalds for dinner. A cheeseburger royale meal later and 12 francs poorer (about 10 dollars), I headed back to my candle lit apartment to do the only thing I could in the dark…sleep.

It is now a week later and I finally have heat and electricity again (they were connected two days after I got back from Rome). The washer is finally working as of today and I am trying to catch up on about three weeks worth of laundry which will probably take me the remainder of the evening because each load takes about an hour and a half just to wash.

Tomorrow I am off to Milan again for the second time this week. One of the international schools is hosting a college fair for US colleges and we have been asked to participate. The big Ivy League schools will be there, so I am curious to see if we get many inquiries but also to see their admissions people. I should have some interesting stories to report in my next blog!