Featherfin Family Services: Nature Based Family Programming

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Featherfin Family Services: Nature Based Family Programming

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🌎🤸 Where the Wonder of Nature Meets the Wonder of Childhood

🐌Nature Nanny Childcare
🍼Care Comrades Nanny Meet Up
🏡Heart of the Home Parent Circle

Learn🧠Play🤪Love❤️Connect🤝

08/26/2026

☄️Hot Take!!!

Visual reminders are a boost, an aid, a way to give young kiddos a sense of instant understanding.

Here is one of my favorites.

08/23/2026

I have teaching in my blood. Both my parents were lifelong public school teachers. Other family members, too. I myself have been a teacher.

So I have always known what teachers do. They plan. They plan themes, lessons, and assessments.

But in my commitment to facilitate and scaffold child-led learning, I don’t do much teaching. Instead, I scout. I shepard. The children scout. They shepard. We all participate in the flow of life.

And sometimes, the flow of life just gives us one surprise bummer after the other. Nothing that can be planned for, but all which can be responded to, with the children. This is life. And in moving through the bummers, we all realize just how often we can turn lemons into lemonade, or in this case, stinky sand into messy glitter into a wonderful opportunity for the girls to bring me into their world.

08/09/2026

They say necessity is the mother of invention.

It is so.

And during adventures in nature, the most ingenuity is required. Something breaks, how do you fix it without a household toolbox or “junk drawer” full of tapes and twisties? Something is physically uncomfortable. How do you find ease without a pillow or air conditioning?

In the case of a recent creekside craft outing with these two ladies, the questions mounted. How do you unclog the mouth of bottle of paint without what we have used at home - a piece of spaghetti? And when your tshirt painting project is complete, how do you hang the shirts to quickly dry without a hanger, or even the popular at home drying rack - the back of a patio chair?
Without a table, where you can paint? And oh no, your toddler hands are covered with dirt and sand and you are further away from the wipes we brought than you care to traverse. What then?

With a curious mind and a willingness to try different approaches, we almost always find solutions to these problems. We suddenly notice or wonder about tools that we didn’t notice before, techniques we have never tried before. Often they work, sometimes they don’t. When they do, we feel great pride at how our mind is partnering with nature to serve us. When they don’t, we must deal with frustration, building resilience.

I say we because it is often me, just as much as the girls, who is met with quandaries and frustrations. Taking children into the wild without a doubt poses more of a mental and physical challenge to me as a caregiver than does staying at home.

And so, to myself and the girls, I repeat a rhyme they now know by heart, “I can do it. I know I can. And if it doesn’t work the first time, I’ll make a different plan.”

But their plans did work - a pine needle thin stick for unclogging, a woodpecker tap tap tap for moving paint into bottles, and snapped fallen branches for hangers, balanced first in the trees and then over the headrests in my car for the ride home.

08/06/2026

Maybe I’ll caption this later. Right now I can’t because my favorite nurse is doctoring my post creek splash boo-boo. ⛑️🩹

Yes. MY boo-boo. 😆

Wanna see Miss EMT in person? Check out my story!

07/29/2026

After months of itching to get back to making caregiver support videos, I finally decided to scratch😆!

So if you are looking for videos about early childhood development and parenting that don’t scream:

❌ influencer
❌sales pitch
❌”fixing” your child
❌”fixing” you as a parent
❌same old, same old

And instead offer up:

My uniquely emotional, quirky, and reflective voice born from a life as the child of two teacher parents, raised right here in Augusta County, and with a background as a children’s librarian, children’s nature play guide, and a nanny. You may not find anyone more OBSESSED with a spending time with young kiddos. I am in complete awe of childhood, and it shows.

First up, a series of reading and literacy tips and tricks. Let’s have fun!!!

02/24/2026

Still here. 🤘
Still naturing in kid land. 🤸
Still absolutely loving it. 👏

But as you may have noticed, I am not posting content nor hosting programs at the moment.

Why not?🤔

Because my current Nature Nanny gig has me hanging out and prepping play and learning invitations with these two amazing gals 45-50 hours a week! And as many of you parents and fellow ECE colleagues can attest, while childcare is awesome, rewarding, funny, meaningful, and healing work, it also takes a lot out of you. Most jobs are predominately mental or emotional or physical, but caring for kids is fully all three, all the time.

So it’s time for a Featherfin content pause, but I’ll be back!

🛝🍄🥾Also, if anyone local to Staunton wants to arrange a play date with an amazing 2 and 4 year old and yours truly, please reach out!!!

12/21/2025

🔥HOT TAKE🔥 DIRECTED VS SOFT ATTENTION

💡Is your focus a fine laser beam or broad and diffuse like moonlight?

💡Does your focus help you think, plan, and do or notice, merge, and be?

💡Does your focus burn through brain fuel reserves or do you sense that it actually helps your brain rest and reset?

Well, the answer is both. We humans need to be able to channel both types of attention.

🧠Directed Attention is what most of us consider “real” focus. Directed attention is celebrated in our culture because it expends energy and leads to results. It is the type of focus that makes us capable of deciding do something or learn something and take the steps necessary to do that very thing. It is aware of time,
to dos, and consequences.

✨But directed attention is only half
of the focus power couple!✨

🧠Diffuse Attention (or “soft”) attention is less well known, but extremely powerful. Diffuse attention, most easily accessed when in nature, expends less brain power but is still online and humming. Soft focus is all about being present and in the moment, about noticing, and about receiving information for just what it is. Some call it being“in the zone” or being in “flow state.” And it is what creative and tuned in moments are made of!

But, in our busy, stimulated culture, one form gets celebrated while one often gets crowded out.

You can probably guess which is the Western Focus of Choice. DIRECTED, but of course! 🫡 None of that DIFFUSE hippie focus, thank you very much 😆. Work hard, play hard, but…keep it hard.

Click the video to learn more and to see a video of a cute baby diffuse attentioning herself into oblivion.

Address

Staunton, VA
24401

Telephone

+15404162128

Website

http://linktr.ee/featherfinfamilyservices, https://featherfin.wixsite.com/mysite

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