About Me

Welcome!  I’m Mindi, working mommy to two boys and military wife of 9 years to Adrian. I was born and raised in Southern Maine and survived the housing projects. Life was not a fairy tale but on occasion I would escape to the beach with  my grandmother or as a tag-a-long kid with a friend’s family. Unlike my actual neighborhood, the beach was a magical, serene place. A place I could be carefree. A place where I felt most at home. I loved listening to the ocean, watching the waves hug the shoreline, and breathing in the sea breeze.

I worked hard throughout high school, was accepted into a decent out-of-state college and made my own dreams come true, when I left Maine to attend college.  After earning my degree, I took a few years off and feel deeper in love with the boy of my dreams.  Once he graduated school, we got hitched and moved to our first duty assignment at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.  While he started his military career, I attended graduate school at the University of Oklahoma (Boomer Sooner!) where I studied Speech-Language Pathology.

I have been practicing in the field for seven years now, teaching children to speak, listen, swallow and correctly use their voice, at a local Children’s Hospital.  After having my first child in 2009, I struggled to find my place in the working world again. As I learned how to get by with a new normal as a working mom, this blog became my creative outlet and memory bank.  My second son was born in April 2011. I again struggled with returning to work and found myself feeling less than excited about my career. At that time, I brainstormed ways to spark my passion for the field of Speech-Language Pathology. From this I developed my weekly speech and language feature, Words in the Sand.  My hope is Words in the Sand will grow a community of parents and caregivers that are excited to build a child’s language, feeding, and memory skills through everyday routines and technology.

When I’m not loving on my boys, blogging or working, I love to knit. As I try to wipe out the boring boy clothes syndrome one sweater at a time, I blog all about my finished projects. I also love to spend time on Pinterest, daydreaming of ways to decorate my house. My two favorite rooms in the house are Xander’s superhero theme room and Noah’s owl nursery. My newest obsession is photography. In the beginning of 2012, I vowed that I would learn how to shoot in manual mode with my Nikon d7000. After taking a photography class, I fell in love with my camera. I enjoy learning new techniques and capturing my boys expressions.

Now that I live in the suburbs of DC, I don’t have the ocean to run to when I need to escape, but I am quite content right where I am. I love being a mommy, even when it doesn’t smell as nice as the ocean. My parenting style loosely follows attachment parenting. Co-sleeping, baby wearing, and breastfeeding are all parts of my vocabulary. Babies grow up too fast. I love the newness of the newborn stage and often wonder if I will ever stop having the feeling of “wanting another new baby”. It sort of scares the crap out of me that I won’t. As the boys continue to grow, I continue to want a life pause button. Yes, I’m one of those mom’s who sobs at every new milestone and I think about how much I will miss these days.

Thanks for stopping by and taking a peek into this magical place. Put your toes in the sand and collect a few of your own shells while I fill my sand pail up with memories of my life with boys.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.