about
Provide a nurturing and beautiful environment matched with unconditional love.
I believe it is a right for a human being to be born into an environment that believes in their goodness and provides a nurturing space for them to unfold and grow as intended.
I distinctly remember the day I was able to articulate in words, at the young age of just five years old, that it was going to be my life’s mission to be an advocate for children.
Even from my tender and still simple, juvenile mind, I often felt that myself and other children were too often accused of complicated adult judgements, and found it confusing and detrimental to the bond we craved, and were naturally intended to have with our well-intentioned parents and caregivers.
I saw myself and other children as a simple delight to witness as our character and purpose unfolded, like the petals of a flower turning toward the light, to find our unique place in the word.
My life’s mission began as I happily took on many of the tasks needed to help my mother care for my younger sister, and soon thereafter was entrusted with other small children, for an hourly wage, by the time I was nine years old. In my early teens, I attended a weeklong conference, which focused on raising children, and read countless books on the same subject while continuing to babysit.
When I was seventeen, I was hired to counsel and educate women on child development at a pregnancy center.
Before I birthed my first child at twenty- five years old, I worked as a nanny for a busy, single, professional mother who traveled a lot. This gave me the opportunity to experience what it actually took to raise a healthy, happy and confident child. This hands-on approach added another important facet to my (at such a young age) years of observations.
Even after all my years of reading and research, I had somehow still not yet heard of Rudolph Steiner. As fate had it, I was finally introduced to his work through a gift given to me at my first baby shower- a book called “You are Your Child’s First Teacher,” by Rahima Baldwin Dancy. This book put words to most everything I thought and believed about raising and nurturing children. Finally my mission in life felt supported and explained.
Her books, and those that I subsequently read after, dove me head first down the Waldorf rabbit hole, and ultimately changed my life. These teachings became a framework to raise my two beautiful children, now 31 and 14 years old, as Waldorf inspired as I could, all while simultaneously earning an income as a landscape designer.
As Rudoph Steiner put it, I was recognized to have ‘the necessary capacities.” So, In 2016, I took off from Garden designing to pursue an opportunity presented to me, a teaching position for a 2nd and 3rd grade class at a private Waldorf inspired school in California, where my daughter was attending her second year of kindergarten.
My heart soared as I tended my little garden of lovely, unique ‘flowers,’ with a personal daily goal to provide a nurturing and beautiful environment matched with unconditional love, so that each child felt truly seen and could unfold in whatever way they were meant to while in my care that year.
To quote the mother of one of my students, “it was a magical year!”
After the unfortunate closing of the school, I wondered how other working parents, or parents of multiple-aged children, were coping. Mostly they were struggling to find a homeschooling lesson plan that reflected their children’s Waldorf-inspired education. I began to hear a similar sentiment repeated in parent circles: “I wish someone would just tell me what to do!”
Taking all I had learned over the years, I went on to homeschool my daughter and decided to design a Waldorf-inspired online lesson plan, where parents like me can access the quality of education that they resonate with.
This is how Pepperhill Homeschool Curriculum came to be.