About Us – Growing on Time
The Classroom Years
I spent eight years in a Seattle-area early learning center watching one- to five-year-olds grow. I tracked every milestone, planned the activities, soothed the tantrums, and sat through parent conferences explaining what “normal” looked like on the charts. I had the developmental sequences memorized. I could tell you, almost to the week, when most kids would start stacking blocks or putting two words together.
I thought that knowledge would transfer cleanly when I had kids of my own.
It didn’t.
When the Charts Came Home
Mae arrived, and suddenly the same milestones I’d once recorded in classroom observation sheets started showing up at 3 a.m. She hit them—every single one—but rarely on the schedule the books preferred, and almost never in the quiet daylight hours I used to associate with progress.
I found myself doing the thing I’d told so many parents not to do: comparing her to the chart, then to other kids, then to the version of her I thought she “should” be by now. The teacher in me knew better. The mom in me still googled at midnight.
That gap—between what I knew professionally and what I felt personally—became the real starting point of this site.
The Toddler Field Notebook
I started keeping a spiral notebook the same way I used to keep classroom observation sheets. Sleep. Food. Moods. The small shifts no one else notices. I write in the same shorthand I used for my students, only now the subject is my own two-year-old.
The notebook doesn’t fix anything. It just keeps me honest. It reminds me what’s actually happening in our house instead of what the internet says should be happening. Some days the entries are practical (“refused all dinner, ate three crackers and a frozen blueberry”). Other days they’re quieter (“watched her stack the same three blocks for twenty minutes and realized I didn’t need to turn it into a lesson”).
That notebook is still on the kitchen counter. It’s the closest thing I have to a teaching philosophy these days.
Two Kids, Two Different Clocks
Ollie is six now, in kindergarten. Adding a second child taught me things no training program covers. The hard hours feel different the second time. The big sibling changes the equation in ways both wonderful and exhausting. The pressure to “get it right” doesn’t disappear—it just multiplies, and then has to be set down again.
My husband Mike, a software engineer and my built-in reality check, is usually the one who notices when I’ve started treating our house like a classroom again. He’s the one who says, “She’s two. She’s allowed to be two.”
I’m still learning to listen.
What I Write Here
I left full-time teaching when Mae was born. I still run occasional parent workshops on toddler sleep and feeding, but most of my energy now goes into the writing I wish had existed in both of my previous jobs.
You’ll find the practical pieces: meals that survive a picky eater, the real signs of potty-training readiness, what a two-year-old is actually supposed to be able to do. You’ll also find the quieter ones—the notebook entries, the Seattle trails that work with a toddler in a carrier or a slow pair of sneakers, the days I finally put the milestone chart away and just watched her.
I don’t take sides in the parenting philosophy wars. I don’t promise your child will be “caught up” by any particular birthday. I offer what’s normal, what helps, and the honest truth from someone who has lived on both sides of the classroom door.
It’s a season, not a race.
— Hannah Bennett
Growing on Time
Seattle, Washington