Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Big changes...

I've decided to start a blog. Yes, that's right, a blog. I do not really consider myself a great writer but I do consider myself a great perfectionist. Which means it might take me 30 minutes to get one sentence out because I keep going back over it checking for grammatical or spelling errors. With that being said, let's get started.

I knew this summer was going to be one of the most exciting summers of my life. I quit working at the end of May, married my best friend in June, went to France in July and now I'm preparing to move to Chicago (by myself...) by the end of August. Wow. Talk about going through major life changes all at once!

June was amazing. Most importantly, I married Tim on June 17th. We had a wonderful, intimate ceremony with our parents (Ken, Stephanie, Jack, Lisa, Chris & Jody), our siblings (Gretchen & Brian) and my wonderful new sister-in-law (Abby). I wore a vintage lace sheath dress and Tim blew me away in a custom made suit. We gathered at Jack & Lisa's house, shared cocktails and laughs and then finally "made it legal" by our longtime friend, Padre Gil (aka Andrew Gilchrist). We all jumped in our cars and headed out to Chester's for a memorable and tasty dinner. The next evening, we celebrated our nuptials with friends and family at a cocktail party at City Arts in Old Town. I was the happiest gal in the whole world.
The wedding crew - our amazing family!
We're married!

July started with a great adventure to France with my new hubby. We started with a week in Paris. Such a lovely and busy city. Tourism is the craze, but with that being said we were there during the high season. We spent evenings in the courtyard of the Louvre, sharing words and a bottle of wine. Days were spent exploring the city and museums. The language barrier was hard at times, but I was so glad to have Tim there by my side. We took the train down to Nice and spent a week there as well. Nice is so beautiful. We spent a lot of time wandering through the narrow streets and tall buildings, shopping for produce and olive oil. Even though Tim ended up with a nasty sunburn, we still enjoyed our trip.
Port of Nice
Musée du Louvre  
Heavenly pizza in Nice

I just spent the past few days with my mom up in Chicago apartment hunting. For those of you that might not know, I will be starting school in September to become a Naturopathic Physician. So what in the world is that?!? I am a huge believer that the human body has an amazing inner strength and ability to heal itself. I also believe in a style of health care that treats the human body as a whole. We each have a unique physical, emotional, mental, genetic, environmental, social, sexual and spiritual makeup. All of these factors affects our health. Sometimes I feel like in our society's medical community we are "prescription pill" happy. Now don't get me wrong, we have some prescription medication that has helped many people around the world. For example, the antibiotic. Amoxicillin does a great job at treating strep throat, I'm not arguing against that. But what about the many patients who get a cold and demand antibiotics from their doctors? Anybody want to talk about antibiotic resistance? How about getting down to the root cause of why things are happening in our bodies! What about holding patients personally responsible for their health!?!?! We could go on and on here, but my main goal is to be able to provide patients a personalized, natural and healthy path towards optimizing their health and life!

I am excited and yet terrified to move to Chicago for school. By securing an apartment this week, it made everything seem so real and my emotional side has started to get the best of me. I've lived in Wichita my entire life. It is going to be so hard to leave my family, friends and most of all my new husband. Why would I want to leave my comfort zone!?!!?! Well, we only grow if we challenge ourselves, right? I have absolutely zero doubt in my heart this is what I want to commit my life to. But wow, change is SO hard. I think we would all agree with that.