About me

I had a very difficult childhood. As young as 9 years old, I remember comforting myself by planning how I would parent differently. Many years later, my husband and I became pregnant with our first child. I wanted so badly to do my very best, so I ordered pregnancy books and did all the precautionary things the doctor told me to do. However, in my second trimester, I developed severe pre-eclampsia. My doctor monitored me closely and tried to find the balance of protecting my life and that of our unborn son. In the beginning of my third trimester, our firstborn was delivered via emergency c-section. He fought hard in the NICU for three weeks and then passed away. The devastation we felt is hard to put into words. Within a few days, I was reading books and doing research about how to honor a deceased child and how to live a meaningful life. Several months later when I became pregnant again, I knew that our firstborn son would be with us as we raised his sibling(s) to know him and to create as close and healthy of a family as we possibly could.

There have been many incredible adventures in the years that followed. Today, we have two teenage sons, and all four of us have managed to create an incredibly fun, loving, challenging, and empowering environment. Its not perfect, but that is what makes it real. As a child who grew up in trauma, I struggled at the beginning of my parenting journey with unrealistic expectations to have a near perfect family. But I quickly realized that I don't want a perfect family. I want a real family, and that's what we've got :)

I have dedicated every day of the last 20 years to learning how to be the best parent I can be. I have found a lot of good sources and taken some wrong paths. I have made a lot of mistakes and learned from them. A few years ago, my teenagers started telling me that I should share my way of parenting with the world. This is an attempt to do that. I hope it can help others and save other parents some of the time it took me to gather all of these sources in one place. And its always nice when we can learn from other's mistakes instead of having to make them ourselves. 

If you'd like to have teenagers who want to hang out with you, respect your opinion, look in their communities to see how they can help, and work diligently to prepare for their futures, then give this website a try. The ways each parent will implement these ideas will look very different, as they should, because parenting is a reflection of each person's unique personality.

I have purchased a lot of books and materials over the years that were instrumental to strengthening my parental super power. I love shopping on Amazon because they have almost everything, I can read reviews to determine if items will fit my needs, and they arrive quickly. When my oldest was about two years old, I received so many Amazon boxes each week that the very strict apartment complex where we lived sent me a notice letter saying that the frequency of deliveries was evidence that I was running a business out of my home! Lol. I explained that I just like to shop online, and they dropped the issue. 

As a stay-at-home mom, I'm always looking for ways to bring in a little income. I hope to become an Amazon affiliate partner, so that I can share what I've learned about parenting and make a little money by recommending only products that I've used and deeply believe in.

To protect my family's privacy, I won't be putting any personal information on these pages, and all of the photos will be stock images that capture the truth and beauty of the content on this site.