On Choosing Richmond

I’m a born and raised Richmond girl from the heart of the Fan.

Well technically, I grew up “West of the Boulevard.” It’s easier to say the Fan because people who aren’t from here don’t know what WOB (as we called it growing up) actually stands for. Let’s be real. Most people who aren’t from WOB don’t know what WOB means. You may be more familiar with the term “Museum District.” Sounds fancy, right?

I learned to ride my bike on the front lawn of the Virginia Historical Society and spent half days off school walking through Carytown. I filled my belly with gummy bears at the 6^th Street Marketplace before VCU games at the Coliseum and learned what a dive bar was with lunches after bike rides down Monument Avenue. This was (is) a great place to grow up (and even better now).

Growing up in the City of Richmond, I attended St. Benedict’s School and St. Gertrude High School, both of which gave me a great foundation for my education. I thought I wanted to be a graphic designer, so I attended VCU with big plans to go to graduate school at the AdCenter. That apparently was not in my cards.

Three years into my program, I moved to Denver, Colorado on a summer-long mission trip. I was partnered with an organization that was created to assist kids who were two to three grades behind. I spent the summer bringing volunteers into these programs in the poorest areas of the city to help change their futures. It was an amazing experience. And even though I didn’t care too much for kids on my first day there, I realized pretty quickly that kids were my passion and that I was in the wrong field.

I was born to teach.

So I didn’t really think I ever wanted to get married. Or have kids. I wasn’t the girl that dreamt of my wedding day while I picked out names for my fictitious children. I just knew when I met my husband (6 weeks before I left for Denver as luck would have it) that I wanted to marry him and have his babies.

After doing the long distance thing and him boarding his first plane to see the impact I was making in Colorado, we decided that if we were going to be cliché and get married, we at least didn’t want to be the couple that lived in Richmond just because our families did. So we packed up and moved to Portland, Oregon.

On our way out of town, the hubs proposed and we spent our entire engagement camping across the country and traveling the Northwest, seeing every show we could and living life. A year later, with our priorities in a different order, we returned to the East Coast to get married and start our “real life” together.

This time, we chose Richmond.

So here we are! My husband, Rick and I, have been married for almost 9 years and have 3 little ones. He runs his own business as a geotechnical driller and I’ve been with Rainbow Station for 8 years. Although I have held many titles over the years, I love my current role as the Preschool Director of our flagship school. And as you can guess, we love all things Richmond and pretty much anything that can be called an adventure (which is pretty much everything when you have multiple children.)