Meet the Family :)

Hello and welcome to The Rathgeb Girls' Survival Guide!
I'm Jess Rathgeb, and I'll be writing all of the posts for this blog :)  In this blog, what I'd like to accomplish is basically to create a life "survival guide" compiled of all of the advice, humorous, and not-so-humorous experiences that I've gone through with my family.  

I guess I should define my family.  First of all, my mom is a single mom.  Her name is Missy, and I'll probably refer to her mostly as "Madre" (which means "mother" in Spanish).  She works full time at Colonial Bank about 15 minutes from our home.  She's been to every single concert, musical, sporting event, and singing competition I've been involved in ever since I can remember.  I have two little sisters, Emily and Katie.  Emily is 12 years old and in the 7th grade.  She's going through the typical "pre-teen" jerky stage, but her heart is bigger than she lets on to it being.  She's very into fashion and cats.  Katie is 10, and in the 5th grade.  Katie falls on the Autism spectrum, and she has these off-the-wall sayings that my family likes to call "Katieisms", which I'm positive we'll encounter at some point during this blog.  My mom's boyfriend, Kyle, also lives with us.  He likes to make sure we keep our house clean and turn off lights when we leave the room, and is very vocal about it, but he's a cool guy.  He just started working as a Correction's Officer, so he values sleep a lot more now.

Some other people I'll probably talk about are my Grammi and Poppop.  Grammi and Poppop have basically helped my mom raise us ever since the divorce.  They, too, come to every singing competition, sporting event, musical, and concert.  They are always there if one of us needs a ride, or a nice home-cooked meal, or a life lesson.  They're like a second set of parents, and if I ever refer to "Carmel Road" I'm talking about their house.

Well, those are the basic people and some basic vocab that you should know to be able to adequately understand this Survival Guide!  Welcome to the family, I'll see you next week with our first life lesson!:)