About me

Ever since I was a young girl, I loved caring for and being with families and children. Growing up in Missouri, I had babysitters and mentors that I looked up to. As a high school student, I knew that I wanted to be a part of families in a way that I could build relationships and mentor younger children just as my mentors and babysitters were role models in my life. I began babysitting for families with elementary aged children. I then began to teach kids tennis lessons during the summer. I then furthered my experience with children by working as a camp counselor at a sports camp for 8-year-old girls in Branson, Missouri for 6 weeks.

Once in college, I babysat for families on a weekly basis with children ages 6 months to 10 years old, served as a teacher in children's ministry at my church, and I mentored elementary and middle school youth twice a month at Frazee Dream Center, an after-school tutoring center for low-income families. During my senior year of college, I coached for Girls on the Run twice a week, a non-profit that inspires girls to be joyful, healthy and confident using a fun, experience-based curriculum which creatively integrates running.

Upon graduation from college three years ago, I moved to New York City to pursue a career in public health and nutrition by working with FoodCorps, a nonprofit organization dedicated to connecting kids to healthy food in schools. I worked in elementary schools in the Bronx with pre-K to 5th-grade students. I developed cooking and garden curriculum that incorporated core learning standards, developed and maintained school gardens alongside students, and facilitated healthy family cooking workshops. This experience further illuminated my passion to work alongside children to create healthy communities and schools. I witnessed elementary students effectively engaged with healthy food by planting a seed, harvesting the fruit, preparing a recipe, and eating that unfamiliar fruit or vegetable for the first time. My experience as a FoodCorps member taught me how to work across diverse cultural and socioeconomic spectrums to identify and address risks to the nutritional health of the low-income families. When my FoodCorps term ended, I continued to work with my supervisor as a Monitoring and Evaluation consultant for food justice and youth culinary programs, where I developed evaluation tools to assess the change in knowledge and attitudes of students towards food knowledge, culinary skills, and youth leadership skills. I am attending graduate school in Fall 2018 to obtain my Masters of Public Health and Nutrition.

Since living in New York City, I have babysat for more than 10 different families as a part-time babysitter. I have worked with children ages newborn to 12 years old. One thing I love most about working with children is the unique personalities that each child brings to life. My key values are honesty, compassion, and patience, and I strive to live them out each day while teaching them to children. I believe in calm communication as an effective method of understanding a child's needs and desires.

I love to explore New York City with children by going to parks, exploring museums, cooking and baking together, arts and crafts, and imaginative play. One thing that I learned from my work with FoodCorps is the importance of experiential education, kids getting to learn by doing and experiencing for themselves. As a babysitter, I strive to facilitate experiential activities to create a fun, safe, and educational environment while spending time together. Another reason why I love to babysit is that I enjoy learning each family's routines, working alongside the parents to help create consistency and routines for positive child development. I am very organized and enjoy planning as well as making changes and being flexible when circumstances change on a minute to minute basis with small children!