My love of the outdoors started young. I grew up in the Okanagan where I spent many hours in our family’s big ol’ back yard, riding my bike around the yard, gardening with my mom, eating the juicy peaches we grew, building roads and cities in the sandbox with my brother.  As I grew older I remember biking down to the nearby creek to swim, family camping trips and ice skating at the local outdoor rink. However I always loved the towering, lush green of the west coast and left the interior for the lower mainland in 1998.

Once I got to the lower mainland I did a variety of jobs in the service industry and eventually found a career as a legal assistant where I worked for about 12 years.  While work as a legal assistant was a stable and secure, I felt unfilled and I longed to leave and do something in line with one of my other passions.  My life changed directions completely with the birth of my son in 2013.  I was a new mother and did not have the heart to go back to work that I was not passionate about and leave my son in a daycare.  Of course like many families we couldn’t even find a daycare.  As a family we made the decision for me to stay at home for a time.  While my son was just one year old I decided to go down the path to open my own home based daycare so my son would have other children to play and socialize with.  It was during this time while running my own LNR daycare in East Vancouver that my eyes were opened to the world of forest school and outdoor education.  It was something I always believed to be true – that children thrive in the experience of being outdoors where their imaginations can flourish and their bodies can be challenged.  Mud, puddles and sticks! Now I was able to facilitate outdoor play in my own daycare. The path I was on felt right to me.

 After enrolling my son in an outdoor early learning program, I became inspired to go back to school to obtain my ECE Certificate and now currently hold an Early Childhood Educator Certificate. For the past four years, I have worked as an outdoor educator and have been with Muddy Boot Prints, an outdoor preschool program in Vancouver, for the last three years.

I am the owner and operator of Room to Roam Outdoor Learning. I have since worked with school aged children in my own after school program but still love the preschoolers.  I have a passion for getting children outdoors. I believe play, particularly outdoor play, is so important for little ones to explore, create and learn.

In my spare time, I enjoy biking, gardening, camping with my family and plinking on my ukulele.