Welcome to Lipstick and Kettlebells, a little fun blog about the trials and victories of fitness, healthy eating, motherhood and life. I am just beginning my journey, so let me tell you what brought me here.

My name is Amber and I am a teacher, wife, mother to one year old Gigi, and a woman just starting to find her voice. My family and friends will tell you that I have been outspoken and independent from birth, but I never quite had the confidence to express myself on a public forum….until now!

Over the past few months, I have been blessed enough to meet some incredible women who are unapologetically themselves. Beautiful, outspoken, and honest women whom I gravitated to and how empowering it was to be around them. These women are a half generation ahead of me, living the lives of mothers whose children are teenagers and graced with the hindsight of experience.

So why did I decide to blog now? Well, it’s funny how sometimes life shows you not what you want, but what you need. In March, I embarked on a new fitness journey that is completely outside my comfort zone (which I explain more in “Fitness Journey Begins”). By the end of the school year, people started noticing changes in me. One morning, I had a fellow colleague tell me that one of his students commented to him how great I was looking and did he know what I was doing to get healthy. The same student came up to me later in the day and said that she wished that she could get healthy and fit too. This stunned me, both times that day I was shocked. How could what I do impact others, much less the teenagers that I teach? It was then that I was reminded that whether we think so or not, others are watching and the actions that we take can impact others. While I was looking up to women who had survived the third decade of their life and the growing pains of young motherhood, I never thought to think that the teenagers that I teach were looking up to me to navigate through adolescence.

So here I am, just a normal woman balancing a family and career while on an incredible journey of fitness, healthy eating, and happiness that I will share with you. I hope my readers comment and share too. Lipstick and Kettlebells is a welcoming community where I hope to learn from you too.