Yes, here it is.  My first blog post.  I am finally taking the leap and starting a blog.  Back in the days when I backpacked and sent back email stories of my trips to friends and family members, many encouraged me to start a blog.  I thought about it.  A little.  But I didn’t start.  And then life got in the way.  I started working more.  Then the same month I accepted an appointment to the Foreign Service I found out I was pregnant.  And here I am 3 years later, about to depart my first post as a Foreign Service Officer, FINALLY starting a blog.  Well, better late than never I suppose.

And so, yeah, here we go.  Here I go a-writing.  And in less than 30 days (23 to be exact, but who’s counting?) my daughter and I depart Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, my first Foreign Service post, to start the next phase of my Foreign Service career and our Foreign Service life.

It will be bittersweet.  I arrived here nearly two years ago with a 6 month old baby.  I will leave here soon with a 2 1/2 year old toddler who speaks about as much Spanish as she does English.  She has spent more of her life in Mexico than in the United States.  Just this past week two neighbor kids stopped by three times to ask if my daughter C could come out and play.  If we were a normal family and stayed in the same place, my daughter would grow up with these kids – who at 4 years older would soon grow pretty tired of playing with her – but they would grow up together nonetheless.  However, we aren’t exactly your normal kind of family.

In a few weeks we will begin approximately nine weeks of travel.  Five days are allocated by the government for our drive back from Ciudad Juarez (just across the border from El Paso, Texas) to Washington, DC and then 8 weeks of the Congress-mandated Home Leave, during which I will reacquaint myself and my daughter with our country.  I have a pretty crazy plan in mind.  But I’ll leave it for future posts.

Here we go….