Then life invited me into a new chapter — and this one changed everything.

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From the moment my eldest daughter was born, we were surrounded by a medical team of doctors, therapists, and specialists. That circle of support has never left us. It has shaped every year since.

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I needed flexibility to care for her while continuing the work I loved — supporting unique minds and the families who love them. Early Intervention gave me that. It also gave me something I hadn't expected: a completely new way of seeing education. I grew alongside the families I served. I learned to adapt, connect, and view development through an even wider lens.

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I had the honour of walking alongside parents through their child's autism diagnosis — sitting with the questions, the grief, the reorientation, the gradual arrival of understanding. And each time, I got curious. I began to dig.

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Into the history of autism. Into ADHD and its female presentation. Into AuDHD — the combination of both. Into Pathological Demand Avoidance. Into the ways neurodivergent profiles are identified, misidentified, and missed entirely — especially in girls, in women, in people who had learned very early to look like they were fine.

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I was on a mission to understand. And I was doing it all while holding tightly to what had always grounded me — a strengths-based gifted education philosophy, a love of neuroscience, and the same deep roots in nature that had steadied me since childhood.

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I was holding tightly to my roots while the ground was shifting beneath me. That's how I knew the roots were real.

 

Two and a half years later, my second daughter arrived — and the world she came into looked different from her sister's. She was, by most measures, more typical. But she is a glass child.

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If you know that term, you know exactly what I mean. The sibling of a child with complex needs — the one who learns early to be easy, to be transparent, to let the light pass through without asking too much for themselves. The one the world sometimes forgets to look directly at, because looking through is so much easier than looking at.

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She too, as she grew, revealed her own beautifully unique mind. One that didn't fit neatly into any expected mold. One that would need its own kind of care, its own kind of understanding.

We were determined that she would not simply be seen through. We were determined to help her become something altogether different — a stained glass child, decorated with life's expression of her own choosing. Every colour hers. Every pattern chosen, not inherited. Brilliant not because the light passes through uninterrupted, but because she transforms it into something entirely her own.

 

Not a glass child — a stained glass child. Every colour hers. Every pattern chosen, not inherited.

 

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​​Watching both of my daughters — one navigating a complex medical and developmental world, one learning to claim her own colours — deepened everything I thought I understood about what children need. It moved the question from the individual to the whole.

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It became: what does our family need? What does this whole ecosystem need to be healthy? What do we each need to not just function, but to genuinely thrive?

 

We are all unique. What does our family forest need to flourish?

 

​And somewhere in that process of digging, exploring, and advocating fiercely — for the children in my care, for their families, for my own daughters, fighting for them to be seen as the whole, capable, extraordinary people they are — I turned the same lens on myself.

 

In my forties, I received late diagnoses of Autism, ADHD, and OCD — along with the quiet companions that tend to travel with them: anxiety, sensory processing differences, and all the things I had simply filed under 'this is just how I am.'

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For essentially my entire life, I had been identified as gifted. I had spent fifteen years working with twice-exceptional students. I knew the research. I knew the profiles. I had sat across from families and helped them name what they were seeing in their children.

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And yet.

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I had spent my whole life being called gifted. I had no idea I was also twice-exceptional.

 

Looking back, it all made sense. It had always made sense. But I was achieving — and somewhere along the way I had absorbed the belief that achievement meant I was fine. That if the grades were good, I was producing for society and independent, the internal experience didn't need examining.

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The diagnosis didn't change who I was. It gave language to experiences I had carried for decades — the sensory overwhelm, the exhaustion, the feeling that life required so much more effort than it appeared to from the outside. The way school had felt impossible to inhabit, even while I excelled inside it. The way I had become so good at performing fine that I had almost forgotten I was performing at all.

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The late diagnosis didn't rewrite my story. It finally explained it.

 

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Understanding the Whole Learner

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The years that followed became a season of learning and unlearning. I dove deep into neuroscience, neuroplasticity, sensory systems, nervous system regulation, somatic healing, autism across the lifespan, and the extraordinary diversity of human brains.

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And I began, slowly and deliberately, to honor what I had spent a lifetime ignoring. To listen to what my body had always been trying to tell me. To build a life with room for quiet, nature, rhythm, and enough space between things.

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I remembered what it felt like to learn on a mountaintop. I finally understood why it had worked.

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Learning to honour my nervous system didn't slow me down.

It finally let me grow.

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It changed how I parent. It changed how I teach. It changed how I show up for every family I work with.