Welcome to the Wandering Drays!

Not all who wander are lost...

Welcome to my blog dedicated to my family and our crazy foreign service life. Never content with staying in one place, we are excited to share our journey. We've survived two unaccompanied tour (Baghdad 2010-2011 and Baghdad again in 2015-2016), multiple TDYs, and enjoyed a two-year family assignment in Cairo, Egypt. The fab hubby is currently learning Turkish for our next assignment...Istanbul, Turkey! We leave for Turkey sometime in summer 2017. I write about what I know. Which is mainly kids, tween drama, gross pets, dealing with lots of government info, our moving adventures, being a nurse, yoga, running, living on too-little sleep, and an addiction to coffee lattes. I hope you'll enjoy this glimpse into our lives.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

First Blog. Ever.

Oh, man. I am about to blog. Never, ever would I have believed that I would someday sit down and write a blog. ANY kind of blog. Until recently, I was anti-blog. Truly, I was anti-technology. I refused to blog. I refused to make a space on myspace. I refused to place my face on facebook. I refused to make a peep on twitter.

Then, in March 2007, I took an RN contract position in Bakersfield, CA. My husband and two kids stayed in Ohio while I jaunted off for nearly 4 months. My dad and I drove cross-country to get me to my destination. Along the way, we stopped and touristed and I had some great photos I wanted to share with my loved ones so far away. Email? I spent a weekend in San Francisco and wanted to tell everyone about my trip. Mass email? I made new friends in the ER I worked but was sad that I was only going to see them for the duration of my contract assignment. How to keep up with my new friends? Hmmm...

Many of my new friends had myspace pages. I begrudgingly started a page. I was almost upset at how much easier it was to keep up with my friends, especially when I returned to Ohio. One year later, when we moved to Los Angles for my husband’s first new job assignment, I was glad I had given up on the anti-technology. I started a facebook page and have never regretted it. Now my mother no longer hounds me for photos of the kids (sorry, Mom!). I can keep up with all my old friends and new friends no matter where we go or move. In fact, I still keep in touch, through facebook now, with many of the friends I made in Bakersfield. Instead of feeling disconnected, which is why I was so anti-facebook-myspace-twitter, however you want to look at it, I feel more connected.

We’ve recently welcomed our son Kellen into the world. Unfortunately, I was flat on my back with a complication suffered from the epidural for the entire first week after giving birth. Now I look back, and I can honestly say that facebook (and my beloved iPhone) was one of the things that got me through that nightmare. I was able to share photos of our new little guy with our friends and family. I was able to keep up with what was going on elsewhere with our loved ones and friends. I was able to keep in touch with the outside world during a time in which I couldn’t be a part of it.


So, here I am starting my first blog. No idea how well this will go, but I am so much more open to it as an positive outlet than I was before. What a perfect way to wander with my thoughts as we wander around the world.

2 comments:

  1. Welcome to blogging. ;) Also, thank you for the idea to use Networked Blogs. You just made my life a thousand times easier with all these sites I try to manage.

    ReplyDelete
  2. to those who were there,, I don't think i could have made it through my last 3yrs of highschool without heathers husband as a friend... and even now i couldn't imagine what life would have been like if i'd never met the Inspirational fellow that he IS....

    ........Eugene

    ReplyDelete