Watch me! No, watch me!

Hello to all Christine’s readers!

I’m Katja and I’m honored to guest blog here while your lovely blogger Christine is at BlogHer.

I blog about my crazy life with three kids and a helicopter pilot husband at Skimbaco Lifestyle Blog - and I’m also a founder of a store with a same name, Skimbaco.com.

You might know me as the lucky lady who sent Suri Cruise some shoes and her father Tom Cruise showed them to Oprah on Oprah show. You might have also read that my children have all born in three different countries while our world travels. I’m from far away too. I’m from Finland, from the North corner of Europe.

While I would love to tell you that my life is all glamorous, I confess: it’s not, unless I make it so! Like Christine, I believe that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade.

My life isn’t glamorous, I’m just making lemonade!

I have experienced amazing things in life not because I’ve never had any bitter lemons, but because I have had so many. While it such a cliché to say that when one door closes, other one opens, not enough many people live it that way. I do.

Be adventurous, try new things, meet different people and don’t be afraid to do something that isn’t quite the norm. You never now what you find when you take the unkown route instead the safe old one.

I enjoy the little journey called life and I truly believe almost anything in life is possible and you can achieve any dream of yours.

Not saying that it’s easy, but it is possible.

I’ve always annoyed my sister by saying that sure she could buy her dream car, Porsche, if she really wanted to. She just has to want it bad enough. She keeps telling me she doesn’t have enough money, like most people would.

I say that even you or me could buy a Porsche, if we really wanted to.

It might mean selling a house. Taking a second job. Never going to movies nor eating at restaurants. No shoe shopping, no manicures or pedicures. Saving on groceries, and saying no to vacations. Driving a bicycle to work while saving money for the dream car. Selling the collectibles, designer handbags or expensive sporting equipment from your closets. It might take months or even years of saving money. But anyone can do it, if truly passionately motivated.



I met a man of my dreams in Germany. Month later he was gone, he flew back to United States. I was a penniless student in Germany, making very little money as a nanny. I saved money to buy a flight ticket back to Finland (where I’m from) and arrived with my bank account empty and a couple of bucks in my pocket.

I was determined to get a job and save enough money so I could come to the US and see the man of my dreams again.

I got a job bottling shampoo in a shampoo factory and I was there less than 48 hours after my flight had landed. This might not be as of a shocking job if you didn’t know my previous jobs, like being a runway model or a ”face” for a huge national company with pictures of me on billboards advertising their products.

I bottled shampoo for one week, then I got a job in a small hotel on the side of a highway. I worked 12-hour-days, 7 days a week. I had my receptionist shifts, and after 8 hours of that, I cleaned rooms and bartended during the weekends.

It was horrible.

But I did it for three months, while living in my grandmother’s house. And I saved enough money for the flight ticket and to stay here for three months.

My friends and family thought I had gone crazy. I was ”wasting my life” I heard. I should have been studying management books and dating lawyers-to-be, not foreign helicopter pilots.

But one week after I had arrived in the US (for the first time), the man of my dreams proposed me (and we spent the money to buy furniture to our first home together).

We just celebrated our tenth anniversary this month. We have three beautiful children, and right now when you are reading this we are moving from Colorado to New York, towards new adventures together.

It might all be crazy, but wasting my life? I don’t think so. I’m living my life.