Our Family

We are a growing family of 4 (soon to be 5 in May!) living in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee in the small little country town of Sneedville.

We do the best we can to live a healthy lifestyle, trying to make the best choices for our children. We are on a pretty tight budget, like most families, so I like to find creative ways to make our grocery money stretch while not sacrificing in the quality. While walking down the grocery isles, my 6 year old will often say in not her quietest voice “look! that’s GMO!”…while not getting into a topical debate here in this early post, I will just say that we avoid GMO products as much as we can, and by doing this we have actually seen improvements in our health. The proof is in the pudding, as some would say.

To add even more to our plate, we also homeschool. It’s funny because as I was completing my bachelors and masters degrees in civil engineering back in my early 20s, I always had a little voice in my head telling me that I really longed to be a teacher. As a graduate student, I was able to get a small taste of this by being a Teaching Assistant. But since I had already invested in one degree and was almost done with the second, I figured I was at a point of no return and ended up becoming the Geotechnical Engineer that I had originally set out to be. It worked out for about 9 years until we decided to switch to a lifestyle that would afford us more time to be together as a family. And so we quit our jobs, moved from San Diego, which required 2 incomes, to Sneedville, which required a lot less financially from us. By doing this move we sacrificed some of the California luxuries, but in return got a family life that became second to none. Yes, some days are a challenge trying to balance it all, and being a teacher to your own child is not always the easiest thing – but I would not trade this life we have for the world.