Welcome to All Manner of Things Blue!  My name is Cheri and I’m glad you have found me here!  I have a degree in Speech and Language Pathology with a certification in Early Childhood Education and have been teaching or teaching teachers for 38 years.  I’ve also been a police wife for that same length of time!  I married a young officer when I was 20 years old and together we raised two children in a blue family.  My 28 year-old son is an officer now and a full-time member of the SWAT team at his department.  My daughter works in the non-profit world so I guess you can say we are a family of community-minded, albeit poorly paid, citizens!  I have two young grandchildren who make me laugh every day and one very badly trained labrador retriever.

Police life in today’s world seems familiar yet foreign to me.  It’s not significantly different than it was when I married a young officer and yet in so many ways, it is.  I have been thinking about starting a blog like this for several years because I am worried about police families.  I read so many negative things about police life, sometimes on social media pages designed to support police wives, moms, etc.  I want young police families to know they CAN thrive in this life.  Not all cops are bad, not all police marriages fail, not all shift work is bad, not all citizens hate cops, not all cops cheat on their wives, not all cops wives feel alone.  There is a positive path through police life and I want to examine that through my blog.

My goal is to speak the truth.  I want to shed light on many of the things we don’t want to talk about in our police world.  I’ll give you my opinion and share my thoughts.  I’ll regale you with a funny story or two and give a little advice along the way. I’ll talk about the good and the bad.  But, when I talk about the bad…I still hope to show you the good that came with it.

I hope you’ll follow my blog, give me tips for how to improve it, contact me and let me know what you want to read about.  In this little corner of the world…we can talk about All Manner of Things Blue…