Hello everyone!

I'm a longtime hellobee member, but Mr. Bee's recent encouragement and comment that introductions are inherently interesting made me decide to go ahead and post this! A lot of you already "know" me, but maybe you'll find out something new about me today.

I'm Arden. I've been married to my childhood sweetheart K for almost two years, and we have a three week old baby girl named Viviana Wren.

My husband and I both grew up overseas (which is how we met) although we were both born here in the USA. Our parents worked for an aid organization, and now we work for the same organization ourselves!
We really enjoy our lives as aid workers - even though we live with very little, our lives are always interesting and we're blessed with the opportunity to give our kids the chance to see the world and experience other cultures and languages and giving them opportunities for service.

We are currently living in the USA (Florida, to be exact) while we undergo some training for our next placement - a long term project in Kosovo. We'll be moving to Kosovo next Fall and expect to spend 6-12 years there. My husband is working as a Electrician's assistant to cover our expenses while we're here, and I stay at home with Vivi. We both attend online classes at night.

I am a doula and childbirth educator, and I'll be using those skills in Kosovo to help women navigate pregnancy and childbirth in a place where this kind of education is non-existent.

My husband and I are raising our daughter to speak two languages from the start - Albanian and English. My husband speaks to her exclusively in Albanian and I speak to her exclusively in English, although she hears us use both interchangeably when talking to each other.

I'm what some people would call "crunchy". I cloth diaper, exclusively breast feed, I live a healthy and natural lifestyle (mostly), I try to keep our home chemical-free and organic as much as possible, I plan to homeschool our children using a Montessori-style approach, and I used midwives at a freestanding birth center for my pregnancy and labor (although it ended in an emergency transfer to the hospital, I still managed to deliver my daughter completely drug-free). I also encapsulated my placenta (which I would do again in a heartbeat, by the way!).

I love to write, craft, research, travel, and cook international food! I also love to learn, and the next things on my list to master are photography (saving up for a DSLR), some specific culinary skills, and a couple more languages (Arabic and Bosnian).

Some random facts about me:
1. I have never broken a bone, had an ear infection, or been admitted to the hospital (except for childbirth).
2. I love equestrian sports, and as a teen I was very serious about dressage and hoped to someday become an olympic dressage rider (but I abandoned that dream because finances wouldn't allow it).
3. I am a master packer and traveler (side effect of a nomadic life) and I am REALLY good at finding cheap flights.
4. I had a crunchy mama before being crunchy was a thing. She cloth diapered me, baby-wore, and breast fed me until I was four. I guess I got it from her.
5. My favorite city in the world is Istanbul. I want to live there someday.

Ok, I think that's it! Did I forget to cover anything that anyone was wondering about?