Centreville Residents Win Award for Best 'Mom' Blog

Press release from julieandmartin.com:

Centreville-residents Julie and Martin Weckerlein recently earned national recognition when their family blog Julie and Martin (www.julieandmartin.com) earned the 2011 Parents Magazine Readers Choice Award for Best All-Around Mom Blog.

The announcement can been seen here: http://www.parents.com/parenting/technology/best-blog-awards-2011/?page=3

In the summer of 2001, Julie 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 three children, traveled, juggled careers and education, and embraced the small and large day-to-day adventures of a multicultural family.

In addition, Julie is also a professional blogger. Today, she further contributes to the internet as a web content manager for the Department of Defense, where she's 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. Martin now works for SunTrust Bank.

Julie’s award-winning writing and photography have also 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.

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.