I wouldn’t call her certifiable, but she’s a little crazy. Or at least when it comes to obsessions. There have been various obsessions – violin, cooking, being pregnant, cloth diapers, baby food, mommyhood… And there is the overarching Google-obsession which could have made her a millionaire by now if in 1999 when she first tried Google and found it to be fabulous, she’d just bought a LITTLE stock…

It’s a personality thing. When she tries something and likes it and then finds parts of it she doesn’t like or understand she said there is a voice in her head (back to the crazy bit) that says, “This could be better. This could be better.” And as far as she is concerned, the best way to find out how something should be better is to Google it. And that is what she does. She Googles until she can’t see straight. She learns not just a little about the current obsession. She learns a LOT. She says she could have gotten graduate degrees for the amount of reading and thinking and learning she does for each obsession.

Violin was the first Kim remembers well. She didn’t just take lessons like some of us – she ate, slept and breathed violin. As a teenager she remembers fun Saturday nights spent in music stores with her musician friends looking for new pieces to try out and perform together (what a dream teenager she must have been).

After college (where she majored in violin performance) she randomly decided to move to Chicago where she landed a job with Kelly Temp Agency. She got assigned to a company that never gave her anything to do so she decided to teach herself how to do web pages. Teach herself EVERYTHING there was to know about web pages (yes, a new obsession). By 2000 she was getting paid to do web development and opened her own business. She was at the perfect place at the perfect time for the internet explosion.

During her time in Chicago she also became obsessed with the Food Network and with cooking. First it was just that she liked one of the shows. Then it progressed to watching it all day long (as she worked from home). Then she realized she really ought to try it herself. And that’s when things moved to crazy. She was so into it that she began to believe opening a box or a can was cheating. She even remembers making everything from scratch for one holiday dinner where she prepared 8 courses for 23 people! Nuts!

In 2003 while Googling she found Classmates.com and went through her entire class emailing everyone she could remember. A few wrote back. Robert was one of them. A guy she had had a bit of a crush on. So when she was next in South Carolina, she asked him out to dinner. And the dinner didn’t really end. 3 months later she moved there and 3 months after that they were married.

When the Navy transferred them to Jacksonville, the internet jobs slowed and she began to realize that it wasn’t so much that she loved the internet as that she loved being a business creator. That at heart, she is an entrepreneur. So she decided to open a personal chef business (combining the cooking obsession with her business sense). Unfortunately, the economy in the area where she lived couldn’t really support it. So then she decided to open a music studio for piano, violin & viola. She worked til she was 36 weeks pregnant before taking a break from serial business creating.

Course, during her pregnancy she’d become totally engulfed by learning all that she could about pregnancy. Not just reading What To Expect or Your Pregnancy Week by Week but knowing everything. She knew exactly what was developing in her baby at every moment. She found out all about her labor and delivery options – which led to a very healthy obsession with natural parenting – drug free labor and delivery, breastfeeding, cloth diapering, making her own baby food, and her own baby slings (which, by the way, she started making for others on the side – yet another business).

But then came THE BABY, a new obsession that led to her current business. Mia came into the world in 2005 and life as Kim knew it changed. Everything revolved around this beautiful little girl and suddenly everything had to be capture on film. Her parents had bought her a camera small enough to fit into an Altoids box so that she could always have it along for shooting pictures of the grandchild. She used it constantly. In fact even found herself buying new outfits and dresses just so that she could take some more shots of this miracle baby.

I asked if it was a baby obsession or a photography obsession? Kim laughs and says the baby certainly came first, but the hobby followed closely behind!

She quickly realized the Altoid camera wasn’t going to be enough and switched to a larger point and shoot. But then that wasn’t enough and soon it was a SLR. The buttons initially intimidated her, but she just kept Googling, learning one thing at a time. She’d notice something in a photo that didn’t quite work, and unlike a lot of us who would just shrug and go on, Kim couldn’t let it go. She had to know. She has to fix and figure it out. And because of that her photography skills have constantly evolved and improved.

The pictures were piling up and suddenly there needed to be a forum for showing off this fabulous child. Kim had long been familiar with the blog world, but had never really had any reason to have one herself. But now she did – Mia. The childs whole life is on their blog.

When she moved to Okinawa a few years ago, things were focused again on pregnancy, this time with her second daughter. She documented her journey to a home birth for Okinawa Hai here. But as she got a hang of managing two she began to think again to enterprise… to creating yet another business. Nothing seemed more logical than turning her newest obsession into work. Last spring, Kimberly Mitchell Photography opened and she is loving this newest adventure.

The back of her business card says “Capture the Moment” because that’s what it’s all about. The children she photographs will only be this age once. She loves when the parents tell her that they love their kids even more after looking at the photographs. She loves being a part of that.

My family was lucky enough to be one of her first sessions and have many wonderful shots like this one:

She became involved in Okinawa Hai about a year ago, helping with some writing and with the new web design. She feels strongly that blogging, especially the newest “Mommy blogging” is fantastic for bringing women together to support and learn from each other. “Women are often too competitive and busy dragging each other down, but if we would really listen to other women’s experiences it could make all the difference in the world.”

When I asked about how blogging is changing the world, she said, “I have had tons of people contact me because of my birth blog asking how to do a homebirth here. If you've done it, you can help pave the way for someone else. I think that's important across the board. And I think that idea is really at the heart of why Okinawa Hai started – to pave the way for others coming after us.”

Photographs by Kimberly Mitchell