I have loved children for as long as I can remember.

I was thirteen when I first stood in front of a Sunday School classroom of preschoolers and felt something settle into place — a quiet certainty that being with young children was not something I did, but something I was. That love carried me through years of daycare work, through college courses on early childhood development and educational philosophy, through every season of watching small people encounter the world for the first time. I am CPR and first aid certified, but more than that — I take time with children as an intentional gift. I love what they notice. I love the joy they share without reservation. I love the way they teach you, if you slow down long enough to let them.

When my own four children came, that love deepened into something more specific.

I had built a career in local and state government and the nonprofit sector — work I found meaningful — but I found myself increasingly drawn back to something simpler and more true. My children were thriving outside. I was not ready to send them somewhere else.

I began to feel a growing disconnection with the pace of modern childhood — the movement from place to place, the pull of screens, the sense that even the youngest children were being asked to hurry through experiences that deserved to last. What I saw instead, when I let myself really look, was that my children thrived outside. They were calmer, more curious, more genuinely themselves on our twenty wooded acres than anywhere else. The land was doing something for them that nothing else could replicate.

That observation led me to Charlotte Mason — the nineteenth century educator whose ideas about early childhood feel, to me, more true now than when she wrote them. Her belief that education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life. Her insistence that young children deserve living books rather than dry instruction, direct encounters with the natural world rather than pictures of it, and the long unhurried stretches of outdoor time that allow a child to develop genuine attention and genuine love. I have been shaped deeply by her thinking and I have watched its truth in my own children's lives every single day.

One moment sealed it for me completely.

I read Nesting by Henry Cole aloud to my children — a quiet, beautiful book about a pair of robins building a nest. In the weeks that followed I watched my children begin to notice robins. Not because I asked them to. Not because it was on a lesson plan. But because the book had opened something in them — a wondering, a watching, a genuine eagerness to find what they had loved in the story living in the world outside our door. That love for robins grew into a love for birds broadly. They began to name them. They began to look for them. A living book had become a living education, and the twenty acres outside our windows had become a classroom more rich than anything I could have designed.

That is what Lyon Acres is built from.

I opened this program because I wanted to offer a few other families what my own children have — a childhood that moves at nature's own pace, rooted in beautiful books and real outdoor work and the ordinary moments that turn out, quietly, to be the whole education. I believe that a child who finishes their year at Lyon Acres carrying a genuine love of learning — a love grown from real experiences on real land in real seasons — is a child who is ready for everything that comes next.

I don't take lightly that you are trusting me with your child's early years. I know what those years are. I know how quickly they pass and how deeply they shape everything that follows. Lyon Acres exists because I believe they deserve to be lived slowly, richly, and well.

I would love to meet your family.

— Bekah