Julie Weckerlein

It all started when an American girl fell in love with a German boy.

In the summer of 2001, Julie Weckerlein started a website for friends and family to follow her wedding plans. At the time, she was a U.S. Air Force airman at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, and her fiancé, Martin, was a tank commander in the German Army. (They had met two years before, when Julie was a high school foreign exchange student in Nuremberg.)

But then the terrorist attacks on 9/11 happened, and her wedding-planning site took on a new role as friends and family wanted to stay connected to the couple as their respective militaries responded to the tragedy. As Germany-based combat operations began in Afghanistan, Julie earned several awards for her writing and public affairs work alongside major national and international media outlets such as The Today Show, MTV, Late Show with David Letterman, the Associated Press, and Reuters. Meanwhile, Martin worked alongside the U.S. Army at their Germany installations to provide extra security.

Despite the change of pace, Martin and Julie were married in the German countryside in April 2002, and they haven’t slowed down since. Over the past 10 years, Julie and Martin continued to share their lives on the blog as they moved to Italy, and then the United States, welcomed their daughters, traveled, juggled careers and education, and embraced the small and large day-to-day adventures of a multicultural family.

These days, Julie works in public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington DC. Before then, she further contributed to the internet as a web content manager and blogger for the Department of Defense, where she was the team leader for Armed with Science, the DOD's official, award-winning science and technology blog linking scientists and engineers to the public. She also continues to serve as an Air Force Reserve public affairs non-commissioned officer after a nine-year active duty career with assignments in Germany, Italy and the Pentagon (where she was one of the first bloggers for the official Air Force Live) and a deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan as a combat correspondent for the Air Force News Service.

Her award-winning writing and photography have been featured in various military and civilian publications and websites, I Am Modern magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Stars and Stripes, the Cincinnati Enquirer, The Kentucky Post and more. She and Martin have also shared their military family and deployment experiences with various publications, to include blogs such as the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury and Army Wives Lives. She was also recently featured on ABC's "The Revolution" sporting a Tim Gunn makeover. 

Now living in the Washington DC area with two daughters and an infant son, Julie and Martin continue to document their lives on www.julieandmartin.com, which recently earned the 2011 Parents Magazine Readers Choice Award for Best All-Around Mom Blog.