About me

I am a stay-at-home mom, or a SAHM. I live in Austin, TX with my daughter, Annika, who is 11 months old, and her dad, my co-parent/ex-boyfriend/friend, Toyin. He's Nigerian. I am an ex-news reporter who misses writing very much.
I have lived in a lot of places.
I was born in Huntington, NY, on Long Island. My family moved to Texas when I was 7 years old. We lived on a ranch just outside of the tiny little town of Trent, population 300. When I was 14 we moved to Abilene, population 100,000. That sounds fairly big, but it has a small town atmosphere. There's not much to do there. When people from out of town would ask us what there was to do the standard answer was, "We got a mall." (Insert Texas drawl)
When I was 22 years old I met an Air Force man named Walter. Abilene also has an Air Force Base, but I met Walter in Wichita Falls, a few hours away from Abilene where he was in tech school. This comes after basic training and before your first station. We got married six weeks after we met and I moved to Okinawa, Japan with him. We lived there for three years. We got a cat and named him Bob.
When we moved back to the states, we lived in Great Falls, MT for a year, then moved to Detroit.
It was in Detroit that I met Annika's dad, Toyin. This was after Walter and I divorced and I decided to finish up school. I had worked at a bank for several years and hated it passionately. I was working on my journalism degree and took a job at the school newspaper where Toyin also worked as the graphic designer.
As I finished up my schooling, I got a job where I was interning at a weekly, community newspaper called The Mirror. The paper was recently killed, or so I heard through the grapevine. We covered six Detroit suburbs, Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge, Royal Oak, Huntington Woods, Berkley and Clawson. My beat was Berkley and Huntington Woods.
I got laid off from that job in the first week of 2007. I had worked there for two years. A month after my layoff I moved back to Texas.I moved to Austin where my parents and sister lived (and still do).
I got a job at a small advertising agency. In August of 2007 I went to visit Toyin where he was living in Norfolk, VA. We had a romantic and fun weekend, swimming in the ocean and jetskiing. Three weeks later I realized I was pregnant.
Toyin moved to Austin and agreed to support me for a year to I could stay home with our daughter, which I have been doing. She was born on May 10, 2008 after 19 1/2 hours of labor, 15 of it without any pain medication.
We have dog named Baltar, named after the character in Battlestar Galactica. Baltar is a big blustery, drooly dog. He doesn't have as much complex subtext as the character on BSG, but I love him anyway. My cat, Bob, died in January. I miss him very much.
I tried to post this in the About Me section Blogger and it was too long. So much for all my journalism training, I am still too verbose.