I spent nearly a decade in a Montessori toddler classroom. I loved the work. I held parent conferences twice a year, kept up regular communication, and genuinely cared about every family. And over time, I started noticing something.
The conversations that actually helped were the ones where parents felt safe enough to tell the whole story. Not the polished version. The real one. A behavior at home they did not know what to do with. A morning that went badly. Something they had been carrying quietly. When that came out, I could actually help. When it stayed hidden, I was working with an incomplete picture. So were they.
Something shifted during COVID, when our conferences moved to Zoom. Parents were at their own kitchen tables. The particular exhaustion of that time made people more honest. They started sharing the stuff they had held back before, and I realized why they had been holding it back. When someone is caring for your child every day, you want that person to love your kid. So without always meaning to, you lead with the good stuff. It is not dishonesty. It is just how we protect the people we love.
I started thinking: what would it look like to be someone different in that equation? Not the child's teacher. Not anyone with a stake in the classroom relationship. Just someone in the parent's corner. Someone you could actually tell the whole story to.
Then I became a mom.
And suddenly all of it met the messy, exhausting, beautiful reality of raising a child in your own home. I learned quickly that knowing the theory and living it every day are two very different things, especially when you're running on broken sleep and cold coffee.
Wide Eyes Little Hands was built from both of those experiences. I work with parents on Milwaukee's North Shore and beyond to bring Montessori principles into real homes, not magazine-worthy ones. My approach is grounded in AMI training, developmental science, and the honest understanding that parenting is hard, and that you don't need to do it perfectly to do it well.