Chasing a Dream - The Announcement

I still remember where I was when I decided I was going to become a family nurse practitioner. I was 15 years old and sitting in my high school counselor's office looking through a book called "100 Career Ideas". Seems like a totally ridiculous way to find your life's calling right? 

Well, it was that book that introduced me to the career of a nurse practitioner but it was the long line of nurses in my family that first inspired me to pursue nursing in the first place. My Grandma was a nurse for over 40 years and as a teenager I was partially responsible for taking her to her doctors' appointments. Almost every place we went, I heard "Oh that's Blanche?? {My grandma's name} She was a GREAT nurse." These were people that she had worked with decades before that still remembered her. I don't know about you, but that is the kind of legacy I can only hope to leave. 

That book in the counseling office that day introduced me to a whole other side of nursing that I had no idea even existed. As I read more and more about the opportunities that nurse practitioners have, I decided that that's what I wanted to do. 

That dream started 9 years ago and it's a dream that has stayed in my heart ever since. At the beginning of this year, I had a conversation with one of my best friends that would change my life. You see, the timing of me going to graduate school didn't seem to be right; Alex was still finishing up his radiology technologist degree and looking at applying to graduate school himself in the near future. 

10 months, several conversations, a lot of research, and many prayers later, I am thrilled to announce that today is my first day of graduate school. The decision was not made lightly and it's a journey that will take me somewhere between two and three years to complete. Not all of the pieces make sense (yet), but I/we are going into this journey excited and ready to take it on. There have been several specific events over the past few months that have confirmed our decision to have me head back to school, and that in itself is super comforting. 

I hope to write a couple of posts in the near future that talk in more detail about how Alex and I approached making this decision as it was one of the more difficult we've had to make as a couple. I'm not sure what the future of this blog will look like with graduate school added on top of work but for now my goal is to keep it around, with the goal of posting once a week. I hope you have a great Monday and I'm off to start on homework!

{Linking up with Ember Grey and Grateful Heart Monday}