🔬 Welcome to Beyond the Reference Range.
I started this space because I keep coming back to one enormous question:
What is worth putting into a childhood—and what is worth protecting as we grow up?
I’m raising a little girl, but I’m also still raising me.
Still learning, questioning, changing my mind. Still figuring out how to love my family well, care for myself, build a good marriage, make a home, cook really good food, explore this ridiculous planet, love our animals, and become a better human without pretending I have everything figured out.
My clinical laboratory background probably explains why I investigate everything. 😅
I wonder. I research. I look at the evidence & question it. I disappear down unnecessary rabbit holes.
Around here you’ll find childhood, family, research rabbit holes, Life Markers, The Unmeasurables, food, animals, nature, adventures, marriage, motherhood, self-discovery, science, medicine, technology, space—and whatever else makes me say, “Wait…what?”
I want my daughter to have some of the slow magic of a ’90s childhood: muddy shoes, books, boredom, animals, imagination, long afternoons, family dinners, and making things with our hands.
But she’s also growing up in a world of AI, rapidly advancing medicine, extraordinary technology, and an enormous universe we’ve barely begun to understand.
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Use the tools. Keep your brain switched on. Ask questions. Check your sources. Use common sense. Be willing to discover you were wrong.
Above everything else: be a good human.
Kind, but not a people-pleaser.
Compassionate, with boundaries.
Quiet or loud.
Nerdy or adventurous.
Sassy. Determined. Different.
Entirely you.
You’ll see the beautiful and messy stuff here. The thing that worked. The activity that went completely to shit. The research that changed my mind. The dinner worth repeating. The tradition that stuck. The one that absolutely did not.
It’s a record of a family that cares to keep paying attention.
Bring your questions and your perspective. Bring the thing I completely missed. We can wonder about it together.
We’re raising a human, not a standard.
& Variation is human. 🧡