Graduation and Moving

Hi everyone! I am way behind on updating and have a few new medical things to update you on. I will get to that very shortly hopefully! I just wanted to share a couple of personal developments first!

Most excitingly, I graduated from Northern Illinois University with my Bachelors degree!!!! I graduated in 3 years with a final GPA of 3.891! I had 6 surgeries during my 3 years of college, so this was a HUGE achievement for me. I felt very poorly on the day of my graduation ceremony, but I have AMAZING friends and family who helped me to make the day as easy and stress free as possible. I sat with a few friends during my ceremony which was really nice to get to sit with people I have gone through this experience with. My ceremony was in the evening and I got home and went straight to sleep, but I had also been able to go out to lunch with a group of ladies who have Chiari Malformation (my brain malformation) that morning. It was so nice to be able to go hang out with so many wonderful people who all understand what I am going through! It was also wonderful to be able to speak with a few younger women who will be starting college soon. It is always amazing to be able to share advice and inspiration for others who will be entering the stage of life I just finished!

Here is a picture of my husband and I after my graduation. You can tell I did not feel well, but I am incredibly proud of my accomplishments!

The other thing that has been keeping me so busy right now is that my husband and I just bought our first home! We are moving out of our apartment by my old university and moving about 45 minutes away closer to where my husband was transferred for his work. It is a LOT of work packing up everything and it has been exhausting for me! We are moving this weekend, so we are in the final stages of trying to get all of our belongings into boxes. It will be nice when we get there, but right now it has been a lot of work to get everything squared away for closing and moving. I am sad to say goodbye to my wonderful job as an after school tutor at the local middle school, but hopefully I will find an equally wonderful job in the new town we are moving to!

I will write a blog post on my medical updates, but I just wanted to share my life updates with all of you!