Kris Ochoa-Keane was born in Washington D.C., the first of five siblings. Kris is mother of six, step-mother of three and grandmother of eight and currently resides in San Diego. Avalanche: Lessons of Love, which she co-wrote with her brother, Stephen J. Oddo, is her first published work. The book was a labor of love fifteen years in the making.After spending three years in Guadalajara, Mexico, where her father taught political science at a local university, the family settled in San Diego, where Kris graduated from Our Lady of Peace Academy. After attending the University of San Diego, Kris worked as a flight attendant for Western Airlines. During a summer in Guadalajara, Kris met her husband-to-be, Mexican businessman Alfonso Ochoa, whom she married on November 11, 1973. Kris and Alfonso immediately started a family in Guadalajara, and welcomed sons Alfonso Jr., Carleric, Christofer, Jonathan and Nicholas, before finally adding daughter Annette to the mix. In addition to raising her children, Kris devoted herself to charity work, including the Organization for Infantile Nutrition (ONI), which fed 5,000 babies from very poor families four formula bottles a day in the perimeters of Guadalajara. Alfonso was killed on March 12, 1991, in an avalanche while heli-skiing in British Columbia, Canada. Kris and her children relocated to San Diego, where the children finished their schooling. She met Dick Keane at a high school football game and after a brief courtship, married him in December 1996. After several wonderful years together, Dick died in October 1991 after suffering a stroke and battling pancreatic cancer. Since 1997, Kris has worked as a bilingual