Patty (Young) Blake

I have been reading bios and I figured it was about time I wrote mine.  Many thanks to all of you who have worked so hard on the reunion committee.  The web site really has been a lot of fun.

After high school I went to the University of Kansas.  Rock chalk Jayhawk!  I am sure everyone knows my beloved Jayhawks won both the Orange Bowl and the men’s NCAA basketball tournament this year.  Yes Mark Sapir, I am talking to you.  I was at Kansas for four years and I studied speech and language sciences.  I went on to get my masters degree in Speech-language Pathology at the University of Texas.  I loved my time at both schools.  I was lucky my best pal Kristie Morse (class of 87) ended up at KU for 3 of the years I was there.  Good times.  What can I say about Austin Texas?  Just a great place to live. 

After I graduated I ended up back in Albuquerque for a short time working as a Speech-Language Pathologist at Lovelace Medical Center.  It was a great job and I learned a lot but I was just not ready to be back in New Mexico.  My supervisor was from the Midwest and she was always telling me how great Chicago was so I up and moved.

I can’t say my introduction to Chicago was great.  In order to move quickly I took a job at a nursing home.  This was really not my first choice for jobs.   After living in Chicago for a month, my apartment was robbed and my car was keyed.   I moved to Chicago in the beginning of the hottest summer in recent Chicago history.  Over 100 people died because of the heat and I was living in one of Chicago’s old apartment buildings with no air conditioning.  The final insult was when my purse was stolen one night out at a bar.  Finally things started to look up.  Just by chance Jason Osborne (class of 87) lived just a few miles from me.  Shortly after,  Tegan Matthews (also class of 87) moved close by.  Kristie Morse stayed with me in Chicago for a short time.  I took a new job that was much more rewarding and I started to really love my life in Chicago.  Those times are some of my favorite memories.

This was also the time that I met my future husband, Bill Blake.  We met at a pick up ultimate frisbee game.  A group of mainly Northwestern graduate students played ultimate a few times a week.  I found out about it from Jason.  Tegan and I used to go play when we could.  Bill is truly the love of my life.  That being said, he is from New Jersey!  We got married in 1998, oddly enough the same weekend as the 10 year reunion.  We decided to get married in California just to inconvenience all the relatives and friends.  I am pretty sure my parents ran into Mark Morris and Greg Hirons during their travels to our wedding.

Many years went by.  Professionally my highlights would be working at the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch (CINN) and at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC).  At CINN I did pre and postoperative evaluation and treatment for primarily patients with brain tumors but a few other diagnosis as well.  I learned a great deal at this job but it was very difficult emotionally watching families go through the grieving process as tumors progressed.  As an aside, my heart goes out to you Michelle.  Your family is in my prayers.  My favorite job was at a day rehabilitation program with RIC.  I worked with traumatic brain injured patients and my job was to help them have the speech, language and thinking skills to return to a productive life, be that school, job or whatever they would be capable of after injury. 

In 2001 we had our first child, Dillon Thomas Blake.   The only thing to say is he is fantastic.  He loves Godzilla, inventing, baseball and Tae Kwon Doe.  He loves the Yankees just to spite me  (I have become one of those crazy Cubs fans).  He is in Kindergarten and is known by his classmates as the “leader of kindness”.  Due to various medical issues (don’t worry, nothing life threatening) we decided another pregnancy would not be the best thing for our family. In April of 2006 Bill and I decided we would try to adopt.   Riley Kate Blake was born October 20 2006 and joined our family on October 24.  Not that I am biased, but she is perfect.  She is almost always happy and she goes with the flow.  I think she is going to be a girly girl because she loves all of her baby dolls and she loves shoes.

We live in Mundelein Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago.  I do not think a week goes by when we don’t say what in the heck are we doing in Mundelein Illinois?  All of Bill’s family is in New Jersey and mine are still in New Mexico and here we are in Mundelein.  All that being said, we love it here.  We have great friends and we live by a beautiful lake.  My husband really enjoys his job and I am lucky enough to stay at home with our kids.  I consider myself to be extremely lucky.

Our summer travel plans are still unclear.  If I do not make the reunion, it has been great to see what all of you are up to. 

Patty