Welcome

A home for lifelong learning and community building.

A village for growing humans.

The definition of the word sonder is the realization that every person around me is living a life as rich, complex, and meaningful as my own. That idea has always centered me, especially around children. They are not vessels to be filled or projects to be completed, but humans to get to know. They are full individuals and community members, at every stage of their development. They may have less experience than adults, and require more care, but in providing that care, most adults learn to care for themselves as well.

If anything, it seems to me that we tend to lose some sense of ourselves as we become adults, and have to be reminded about our actual priorities. I know that being around children has helped me learn more about myself, especially as I focus on decreasing judgments, setting boundaries, and giving other people more freedom to be themselves. We are social creatures; learning as an individual can only take us so far. Our friendships, worries, conflicts, passions, insecurities, and ideas—and the experience of navigating those things alongside other people—help shape the inner story of whom we believe ourselves to be. Yet genuine community can be surprisingly difficult to find in our current culture. Why are some of the humans with the highest IQs, most beauty, and wealth some of the most unhappy?

 For nearly two decades, I have made my living as a registered nurse; I have honored my children as a homeschool parent; and I have spent much of my free time building communities centered on connection. Through it all, working in emergency rooms where people are at their most vulnerable, and providing community, education, and parenting small humans, I have examined this ever-elusive concept of joy. Because I did not have much of a childhood myself, I have also been learning alongside my own children. Over the years, I've become less and less convinced that acquisition of wealth, high academics, or ideal beauty should occupy the center of childhood or adulthood goals.

Education matters, of course. But learning is also simply something humans do. We observe. We imitate. We wonder. We practice. We fail. We try again. And when something matters to us, learning can require enormous dedication, focus, frustration, and work. Children are already human; we don't need to train them for some future moment when they finally become people. What they need from us is mainly for us to find our own joy as well as a little time, guidance, safety, opportunity, and help making sense of an extraordinarily complicated world while discovering who they are within it.

That requires COMMUNITY.

Children need long stretches of unstructured time together. They need friendships they learn to navigate themselves, disagreements adults don't solve for them, opportunities to be awkward and get things wrong, younger children to care for, older children to learn from, and communities where they are genuinely known. For the past decade, much of my spare time has focused on creating space where those things can happen. A community beyond the nuclear family gives children more people, relationships, experiences, and perspectives through which to discover the story they tell themselves about who they are and where they belong.

Sonder Life has been the name I've used for much of that work. Because nursing provides my family's financial stability, I've had the privilege of creating free community classes, gatherings, and opportunities simply because I believed my children—and other children—needed them. I've come to think of friendship, play, belonging, and community less as enrichment and more as necessities of a healthy childhood.

Now my own children are becoming increasingly independent, and Sonder Life is changing with me. Before I begin my next big educational goal of pursuing a graduate degree, I'd like to spend this season offering free mentorship to caregivers who are trying to build something similar: a homeschool life that honors the choices children are capable of making, and a community that gives them room to discover themselves alongside other people.

I don't want to hand families a formula. I'm still building these skills myself, and I intend to remain a lifelong learner. What I can offer is nearly two decades of experience, the mistakes I've made, the things I've watched work, the communities I've helped build, and another person to think alongside you as you figure out what works for your particular children and family.

Sometimes the most important thing we can help a child build isn't an academic skill at all.

It's a sense of who I am, who my people are, and where I belong. I am definitely still learning this, reach out if you want to join me.