About Me
In my earliest memory, I am frustrated because I can't read. I was 2 years, 4 months, and 6 days old. I know that precisely because I was visiting my sister in the hospital the day after her birth. I wanted to read a storybook in the waiting room, but no one would oblige me. I don't remember seeing my baby sister, but I do remember chaffing at the injustice of the symbols on the page making sense to other people but not me. Since then, reading, writing, and storytelling have entertained, educated, and encouraged me in all my roles - as a student, teacher, scientist, writer, friend, wife, and foster, adoptive, homeschooling and special needs parent (among others). I write fiction and nonfiction for children and their caregivers. My blog focuses on parenting, especially foster and adoptive parenting. I hope you find something here to entertain, educate or encourage you in your roles.
More of My Story
That earliest remembered ambition, to learn to read, was of course followed by others. The next one I recall, at age five, was to ride a bike with no training wheels. In fourth grade I was an aspiring writer. I even entered (and won) a writing contest for elementary school kids. When I was fourteen, I decided to be a physicist, a goal that guided the next decade of my life. I attended a STEM high school that prepared me well for my physics major and math minor in college. (I also did a Russian minor, almost entirely because of my love of dead Russian novelists.) I was then accepted to a Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan. Everything was going according to plan. Except, that the longer I spent in academia, the more exposure I had to what life was like for physics researchers and professors, and I began to doubt that it was the life I wanted. I felt I had gotten on the wrong train, and however much I was enjoying the journey, I would eventually find myself in a place I didn't want to be. So I exited at the next stop, the completion of my master's degree. In the meantime, I had fallen in love and married. While my husband finished grad school, I taught at the STEM high school that was my alma mater. Then we started a family. Over the next two decades we would welcome four children into our home by birth and eight whom we cared for as foster parents. Two of those remarkable kids stayed forever. In addition to parenting, I have worked as a tutor, childbirth educator, doula, foster parent trainer and, now, as a teacher (again) and writer. I have returned to my fourth grade ambition, though I still love physics, and I can still ride a bike without training wheels.