A Summary of 'ChelleSidetracked Sisters

Watching my hero with her hamster

Of all the Sidetracked Sisters, I’d consider myself to be the most logical or systematic one… That being said – I’ll start from the beginning and briefly tell my story. Additional details will come later. I’m the youngest of 2 daughters to Art & Sandy. For as long as I can remember, my older sister (Lisa) was my hero. I followed in her footsteps in everything (almost). She played flute, so did I. She was a cheerleader, so was I. She learned Spanish, so did I. She went to college in Eau Claire, so did I. You get the idea.

Moving into later years, I met my future ex-husband when I was 15 (10th grade) and he was 18 (12th grade). We dated off and on thru high school and college and finally, after we both graduated college, we got married (1992). We lived in Waukesha, WI and moved to New Berlin, WI shortly after our first son was born in 1995.

Both he and I were/are extremely dependent on our families. Just one example of that is that for the first 3 years of Brad’s life, we never had a babysitter for him that wasn’t part of the family.

In 1998 we moved back to our hometown of Beaver Dam and within a few months, our second son was born. He wasn’t due until December of that year, but decided to come just a bit early and arrived in October!!

Pregnant with Jess

Finally, our family became complete after going on Lisa’s honeymoon cruise… We came home pregnant!! Our last child and only daughter was born in 2001.

Skipping topics and moving into the work arena – I went to school and graduated with a math major (statistical emphasis) and a computer science minor. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with that, so for the first 6 months after graduation, I just moved home and worked at the family furniture store.

As a kid, I always said I wanted to be a teacher, but as I got older, I knew I didn’t want to teach kids. So – when I had the opportunity to teach computers to adults, I decided that was perfect. After 3 months of teaching, my boss said “You like technical stuff – right? Well, here is our network, take care of it.” That led to me being the first technical instructor in Wisconsin for my company. At 25 years old, I was teaching 50-year-old men how to set up their computer systems and networks! Crazy!! After one night of working all night setting up a classroom and having my 6-month-old sleep in his car seat next to me, I decided that I was done teaching! I then moved into computer consulting. I was still doing consulting in southern Wisconsin, between Milwaukee and Madison, while I was pregnant with my 2nd son. After having him, I continued consulting, driving at least 2 hours a day, each day. It got to be way too much time away from home. I then made the jump over to a local bank, taking care of their computers and network for all 10 locations. I was the sole person in the IT department to start with. I worked at that bank for the next 8 years. I finally made my last jump to my current job where I still do consulting and use all my teaching, network administration, and consulting skills. I’ve been at my current job for the past 13 years. Suffice it to say – I love computers and don’t see myself doing much else in the way of a career.

I have so many more details I want to share, but it’ll have to wait for my next post. Until then…